This land is whose land? In a renewed effort to control federal lands, an alternative path has emerged.

• Author: Frazzini, Kevin
• Position: FEDERALISM

The federal government has long had control issues when it comes to public lands in the West. It manages and pays for nearly everything that happens on more than 300 million acres, from recreation and wildlife conservation to mining, logging, grazing and oil and gas drilling.

This presents the states with a range of challenges as high and wide as the Western sky. Much of the land sits atop energy and mineral resources they'd love to develop. Federal lands are not subject to state or local taxes, of course, affecting revenue generation, and they sometimes wrap around state or private lands that do generate revenue, leading to conflict because of federal environmental regulations.

Furthermore, the Federal Land Policy Management Act stipulates that "public lands be retained in federal ownership." What's a state to do?

Since the federal act's passage in 1976, Western legislators have periodically chafed at what they claim are limits on their ability to manage the land inside their borders and develop their economies.

Land Locked

Those claims took on a renewed vigor in 2012 when the Utah Legislature passed the Transfer of Public Lands Act, sponsored by Representative Ken Ivory (R), a vocal proponent of conveying federal land to state control. Ivory founded the nonprofit American Lands Council, which advocates for "locally driven stewardship to improve public access, environmental health and economic productivity on public lands," according to its website.

Utah's law, which authorized suing the federal government if it didn't turn over more than 30 million acres to the state by the end of 2014, has resulted in a standstill: The feds haven't transfered title to any land, and so far the state hasn't filed suit, though it recently hired a firm to prepare a legal strategy.

The law "expressly takes off the table the national parks, congressionally designated wilderness and other national treasures," Ivory says. Utah lawmakers passed legislation last year supporting the 2012 bill, proving that measure wasn't a "land grab," as some critics have suggested, the American Lands Council says. Rather, it's "truly an effort to bring reasonable management and use practices to public lands in Utah and throughout the West."

For Ivory, it's a matter of fairness. "The federal government honored the promise to transfer title to the public lands to all states east of Colorado (and with Hawaii to our far west)," he said of his bill. "Yet, after 116 years, the federal government still controls more than 65 percent of Utah's...