Millions of Acres of Public Land Sales Slated for Tax Bill

(Bloomberg) -- The sale of millions of acres of federal land would provide billions of dollars to help pay for President Donald Trump’s massive package of tax cuts and spending in the Senate’s version of the bill released Wednesday night. 

As much as around 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service would be mandated for sale in the legislation. The measure, requiring each agency to sell a small percentage of the hundreds of millions of acres of land they manage in eligible states that include Alaska as well as western states, could raise as much as $10 billion over 10 years, according to a fact sheet.

The plan is part of a broader effort to generate as much as $29 billion through a combination of expanded oil, gas, coal and geothermal lease sales, and new timber sales made public in the legislation unveiled by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Similar energy requirements, included new energy lease sales in the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, were included in the House version of the bill, which passed by a one-vote margin last month. 

The sale of public lands to help pay for the legislation has been a political lightning rod. A plan to sell about 500,000 acres of federal land in Utah and Nevada was stripped by the House version of the bill amid opposition from Republicans such as Montana Representative Ryan Zinke. 

The concept of public land sales has also enraged environmental and conservation groups, who say the proposal threatens wildlife as well as access to lands for outdoor recreation, hunters and fisherman. 

“It’s a travesty that Senate Republicans are putting more than 3 million acres of our beloved public lands on the chopping block to sell at fire-sale prices to build mega mansions for the ultra-rich,” said Patrick Donnelly, a director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Republicans have said the sales are needed to provide cheap land to help address a housing crisis, and to help western states, where the government owns large swaths of federal land, to restore the areas to economic production and associated tax revenue. 

“This proposal allows a fraction of 1% of federal land to be used to build houses,” the Senate energy committee said in the fact sheet. “In doing so, it will create thousands of jobs, allow millions of Americans to realize the American dream, and reduce the deficit and fund our public lands.”

The Senate bill aligns with a Trump administration plan to identify areas of “underutilized” land suitable for development. 

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Wednesday the agency had identified some 250,000 acres near cities where development could lower the cost of housing. 

But New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich, the panel’s top Democrat, said the idea was deeply unpopular in the West with “animosity that runs the entire political spectrum.”

“These are places that belong to all of us,” Heinrich said in an interview Thursday. “Once this stuff gets sold off to developers, we’ll never get it back. It will be behind a no trespassing sign.”

(Updates with comments from Interior secretary and senator starting in the ninth paragraph.)

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