Conservation groups worried about how Senate public land sale plan could affect New Mexico

Senate Republicans are considering a plan to sell 2 million acres of public lands, something conservation groups in New Mexico worry could undermine local community input on public land sales and the work to conserve species like endangered trout.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee released the text of its piece of the Senate budget bill Wednesday night. It includes a mandate to sell 2 million to 3 million acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands over the next five years in 11 western states, including New Mexico, for the sake of building housing. A similar proposal in the House was stripped shortly before the lower chamber passed its budget package.

“Senate Republicans have finally said the quiet part out loud: They want to put millions of acres of our public lands up in a fire sale, destroy the investments that have created thousands of manufacturing and clean energy jobs — including in their home states, and obliterate programs that lower energy costs for everyday Americans,” the top committee Democrat Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said in a statement.

Committee Chair Mike Lee, R-Utah, has spearheaded recent efforts to sell federally owned public lands.

“We’re cutting billions in unused Biden-era climate slush funds, opening up energy and resource development, turning federal liabilities into taxpayer value, while making housing more affordable for hardworking American families. This is how we make government smaller, freer, and work for Americans,” Lee said in a statement.

The states that would be eligible for land sales include New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Alaska, California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming. Montana is specifically excluded.

The legislation also excludes national monuments, recreation areas, conservation areas, historic sites, memorials or battlefields; units of the national wildlife refuge system, fish hatchery system or national park system; and components of the national wilderness preservation system, national wild and scenic rivers system or national trails system. Land with valid existing rights, like mining claims or grazing permits, would also be excluded.

Compared to the dead House proposal, the Senate plan includes more land and broadens the sellable land from just BLM land to include Forest Service land.

Under the proposal, 67,500 acres to 100,000 acres of BLM land and 46,600 acres to 70,000 acres of National Forest land in New Mexico could be sold off, according to an estimate from Michael Carroll, director of the BLM campaign at advocacy group The Wilderness Society.

The legislation says any interested party could nominate public lands for sale, language that concerns Carroll.

“There’s a lot of questions of who qualifies for ‘any interested party.’ Does that include foreign governments? Does it include major international corporations?” Carroll said.

Local and state governments would have right of first refusal to purchase the federal land.

Chris Wood, president and CEO of advocacy group Trout Unlimited, is hopeful the legislation won’t make it through Congress.

“Because in the pantheon of bad ideas, this one sits pretty close to the top,” Wood said. “I think what the sponsors of this idea forget is that public lands are a uniquely American idea and ideal. These are the lands that literally formed the character of the nation as we made our way west, and they are the envy of the rest of the world.”

Wood is not opposed to trading low conservation value public lands with high conservation value public lands for the sake of developing housing for communities, but believes mandating land sales in a federal budget bill without a public consideration process is offensive.

Much of the remaining trout habitat for the 23 native U.S. trout, including the Gila trout and the Rio Grande cutthroat trout, is within federally owned public land, Wood said.

“Hunters and anglers across the western United States, who don’t want to beg to hunt on private land, are going to turn out against this proposal in droves. The hunting and angling community is one that’s slow to anger, but I would avoid the hornet’s nest when they get worked up. And they’re getting worked up about this one,” he said.