Hot public land access news is de ja vu all over again

By Ron Moody

“It’s De ja Vu all over again,” Yogi Berra once famously remarked in what has become history’s most famous redundancy.

When it comes to public access to public lands and waters the latest hot news raises the ghost of the great Yogi – to suddenly discover the lack of access to millions of acres of federal and state public lands is de ja vu distilled to its bitterest essence.

A spate of news stories last week were sparked by release of a new report by the Center for Western Priorities (CWP). {http://www.westernpriorities.org/}

That study reveals (hold your breath here) that some 4 million public acres in states of the Rocky West were inaccessible to their owners – the American people. For those western public estate activists who have been around a few decades the question pops immediately to mind, “yes, and your point is?”

In discussing the new report CWP’s Trevor Kincaid reportedly observed: “As far as we know, we’re the only group that’s ever looked into this.”

Sigh.

I’m delighted the report was developed and issued by CWP. The news coverage it generates could conceivably make a difference, somehow. But the actual information is infuriatingly old, old stinking news.

The public access barrier is all too familiar to anybody wanting to use public lands and waters. CWP missed it but the federal General Accounting Office, the investigative agency of Congress, completed a nationwide survey of access to federal lands in April 1992. Yes, that’s the 22-years-ago 1992. The report number is GAO/RCED-92-116BR for anyone wanting to look it up. The structure of the report was a national survey of local federal land managers and was done at the request of Congressman Bruce Vento, then chair of the House SubCommittee on National Parks and Public Lands.

In 1992, according to the GAO report, some 50.4 million acres, or about 14 percent, of the nearly 700 million total acres of federal land lacked public access. Just counting fingers and toes I don’t come up with much progress over the intervening generation of American citizens.

That 50.4 million-acre number isn’t going to shrink over the next 22 years unless a few more locked-out citizens generate some fire-in-the-belly about the loss of use of their property. The number of lost acres could even increase.

How to solve the problem is almost as well understood as is the knowledge of existence of the problem. A year after the GAO report the Recreation Roundtable, a recreation industry group, recommended Congress deliver a $50 million appropriation to access acquisition with $25 million each to the Forest Service and BLM. Fat chance of getting that through Congress today but it is a known action and would help.

Currently, activists are proposing a dedicated earmark from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) to pay for access acquisition.  Since the House of Representatives is preoccupied with totally defunding the LWCF so they can further defund the national treasury, they are likely too busy to think of actually paying for access acquisition.

And so it continues, year after year.  And who is to blame?

I say ‘We The People’ are to blame. Politicians frequently exhibit sensory loss, particularly to their hearing, but they can smell a vote from a mile up wind. Solutions to the access problem will magically become real when votes ride on access issues.

Meanwhile, back at the locked gate, one small group of citizens has established a unique record of dedication to the public access problem along with a string of successes in breaking locks to lands and waters.

That group is headquartered here in Montana and they are the Public Land and Water Access Association (PLWA). You can find them at http://www.plwa.org/

I won’t go into their history in this column. But PLWA stands on a side of the access issue that distinguishes them from other public resource advocacy groups – they take action to open access instead of just talking about it.

This makes PLWA greatly unpopular with those people who either make money by locking up access or simply want to keep the public treasure for themselves. As you might expect this leads to PLWA being a small group since the average joe or jane has no stomach for being unpopular in service to the public good.

In 1993, the magnitude of need to open access to federal lands was about 28,000 easements. At that time the acquisition rate was about 350 easements per year.

Whatever the number is today I predict it’s lower than 350.

At this rate of progress we will have to pay a toll just to step off the pavement 20 years from now.

As a footnote I dedicate this column to memory of the late Paul Berg of Billings Montana. In the later years of his life Paul showed up at every public discussion of access issues in Montana and loudly demanded a redress of the grievance while waving a copy of the 1992 GAO report and a copy of the 1993 Recreation Roundtable report. Before his death Paul bequeathed his copies of those reports to me with orders to keep waving them.

I’m afraid it’s been too long since I last followed those instructions. But one good result of the new CWP report is that it made me dig the copies out of my files and take them back in hand for future waving.