With 93 percent of all federally owned land located in the West, U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) thinks the national agency responsible for managing millions of acres of those surface and underground holdings should be right there near the action.
Sen. Gardner is particularly concerned about directives and other decisions made during recent years by the Washington, D.C.-based Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that he says have been preferential to “deep-pocketed radical special interests” rather than those from western-located field officers and residents.
“When you don’t live in the communities that are among and surrounded by these lands, it is easy to make decisions that close off energy development or close cattle ranches, because the consequences are felt out West, thousands of miles away from the decisionmakers on the Potomac River,” said Sen. Gardner during Senate floor comments on Feb. 28.
The senator, who launched his floor remarks commending U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for efforts to revamp his department, used a white United States map as a visual to drive home his point that the BLM is too far removed from most of the federal government’s land holdings, which were represented by red dots on the map. Predominant in the nation’s 11 western-most states and Alaska, the red dots ran together forming an uneven large red splotch in the West where the federal government owns land compared with fewer groups of red dots located around the rest of the country. “Legislation that I have introduced … would fix this problem,” he said.
The Bureau of Land Management Headquarters Relocation Act, S. 1007, which Gardner introduced on May 2, 2017, would authorize and require the U.S. Department of the Interior to submit a cost-effective strategy and timeline for relocating its D.C. headquarters to one of 12 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington or Wyoming, according to the bill’s congressional record summary. The four original cosponsors who joined Gardner in introducing the measure are U.S. Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Dean Heller (R-NV), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), and Steve Daines (R-MT).
S. 1007 has been under consideration by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee since its introduction. In fact, Gardner, a member of that committee, first broached the BLM relocation idea during one of its June 2016 hearings, according to his office.
Noting that a recent budget request by the Department of the Interior stipulated its forthcoming modernization plan for the next century, Gardner said, “At the top of the list should be relocating the BLM headquarters out West.”
“Grand Junction, Colorado, is a beautiful place that can accommodate an agency headquarters,” the senator said, calling out his home state, “and it has the benefit of a populace that is intimately familiar with public land management policy and decision-making.”