A mandate to sell millions of acres of public land was struck from the Republican budget reconciliation bill that’s moving through the U.S. Senate this week, after the Senate parliamentarian ruled on Monday that the public land sales didn’t clearly affect the budget. But some parcels of land might make it back into the bill.
Two days before the parliamentarian’s ruling, dozens of people gathered on a remote beach on Prince of Wales Island, taking a picture with a large wooden board painted with three red words: NOT FOR SALE. Then they sent the photo to lawmakers.
“When we were holding that sign, I think we all felt upset,” Elsa Sebastian said. “This was happening for reasons that we didn’t understand.”
Sebastian lives in a small community near Port Protection. It’s a remote area surrounded by the flora and fauna of the Tongass National Forest — and she said that’s why people live here.
“It’s our way of life,” she said. “It’s being able to continue to hunt and fish and play and explore and, like, find ourselves in these places.”
Sebastian said the lack of public engagement from lawmakers felt like a betrayal of trust, and privatizing parts of the Tongass would significantly affect rural communities like hers.
“We need ultimate transparency when it comes to decisions around our public lands,” she said. “And that’s not what we got this time around.”
U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, added the proposal to the mega bill that would have required the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to sell off roughly two to three million acres of land across 11 western states.
National parks, monuments and other protected lands were excluded, but roughly 82 million acres in Alaska could have been eligible for those sales, including sections of the Tongass and Chugach National Forests and parts of the Interior.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told the Anchorage Daily News last week that public land sales would help Alaska develop affordable housing. But much of the identified public lands are not suited for housing development.
The Senate parliamentarian decided that the mandate breaks a rule ensuring that reconciliation bills like this one focus on fiscal issues rather than unrelated policy changes and ordered the section’s removal.
Lee is reportedly revising the public land sale proposal to try to include BLM lands within five miles of town borders. According to The Hill, that would include a sale of somewhere between 600,000 and 1.2 million acres of BLM land nationwide. The new proposal is expected to exclude National forest lands, so the Tongass and Chugach National Forests might not be affected.
Joe Plesha, Murkowski’s communications director, said the language is currently evolving, but it’s now about selling public lands purely for housing and local needs associated with housing. He said there might also be provisions for a review process.
“Eligible BLM lands could be made available to build housing for communities after a significant process that involves nominations, consultation, review and first right of refusal for local governments,” Plesha said in a statement to KTOO.
The Forest Service and BLM declined to comment on pending legislation, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which manages the Forest Service, did not respond.
Kate Glover is a Juneau-based attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm. She said the Forest Service and BLM already have the authority to sell or exchange land under current laws.
“But in those cases, the agencies have to take a look at the public interest and decide whether it makes sense to sell the land or not,” Glover said.
She said what’s different about a mandate is that it would require sales whether or not they are in the public interest.
Also, Glover said that selling steep and rugged public lands won’t solve Alaska’s affordable housing problem because many of those areas are not connected to existing infrastructure.
“It’s more likely that that’s going to allow for building new mansions and second homes for people from out of state,” she said.
The Wilderness Society published a map showing swaths of land that could qualify for sales under the original bill, fueling public outcry on social media. Josh Hicks is the organization’s director of conservation campaigns in Denver, Colorado. He said the controversial idea to sell off public lands is widely unpopular.
“We’re seeing people from across the political spectrum in opposition to this proposal,” Hicks said. “A lot of folks in the sporting community who go and hunt and fish in our public lands absolutely are rising up.”
Some Republican representatives from Colorado, Idaho and Montana spoke out against the sell-off. Alaska Rep. Nick Begich III, who voted for the bill when it passed through the House, did not respond to a request for comment. Sen. Dan Sullivan, who has indicated support for public land sales in Alaska, also did not respond.
Amendments to the bill have not yet been made public, and it’s unclear whether revised public land sales will be approved by the parliamentarian. Senate Republicans are aiming to vote on the bill by July 4.
KFSK's Olivia Rose co-reported and wrote this story.
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