Guy W. Farmer: Washington’s management of west is gobbledygook

Here’s an excerpt from a recent Washington, D.C.-datelined Associated Press news story: “Justice Department lawyers representing three U.S. agencies say it took an unprecedented effort by officials in 11 western states (including Nevada) . . . to persuade the Fish and Wildlife Service to reverse its 2010 conclusion that protection of the greater sage grouse was warranted under the Endangered Species Act.”

That convoluted official gobbledygook raises a question westerners are asking: Why are decisions involving the greater sage grouse, which is found only in the West, being made by federal bureaucrats thousands of miles away in Washington? Fortunately, several politicians including struggling GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush and two Carson City Republicans, Sen. Dean Heller and Congressman Mark Amodei, are asking variations of that question. They want to know why the U.S. Interior Department is based in Washington even though most of the public lands it owns and/or manages are located in the West.

Both Amodei and Heller have raised that issue in recent newspaper op-ed columns. “The federal government owns about half the land in the West, including more than 86 percent of Nevada, yet the Feds own less than 5 percent of the East,” Amodei wrote in a Reno daily. “Most decision-makers in Washington, D.C. are detached by 2,000-plus miles from the impact of their decisions. They have no idea what they mean for families in the West . . . or for communities who face obstacles in the form of federal constraints.”

Heller wrote an op-ed for the Appeal on Thursday. “Rather than perpetually seeking to acquire more land . . . Jeb would ensure that federal land management agencies take better care of what they already have,” the senator wrote as he endorsed the faltering Bush for the presidency. Unfortunately, I think Bush lost last Wednesday’s GOP debate and his weak campaign is now on life support.

Nevertheless, Bush’s imaginative, even radical, western lands management plan suggests moving U.S. Interior Department headquarters out of Washington. Although more than 90 percent of Interior Department employees already work outside of Washington — many of them in the D.C. suburbs — some 5,000 well-paid senior bureaucrats remain in Washington far removed from land and water issues that impact the West. I like that idea partly because several of the most affluent counties in the U.S. are in the D.C. suburbs, where high-ranking federal bureaucrats live the good life enjoying lifetime job security — they can’t be fired — and where the living is easy.

During a recent Reno visit, Bush said Interior’s top decision-makers should be based in the West, where the action is, perhaps in Denver, Salt Lake City or even Reno. He argued vast tracts of federal lands are in the West and not anywhere near Washington, which is dysfunctional and out of touch with the rest of the nation.

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: Amodei and Heller don’t advocate turning national parks, national forests or historical sites over to the states, and neither do I. Rather, they favor federal-state negotiations on unproductive federal lands that could be turned over to the states, thereby achieving “a true and full partnership, not unilateral edicts from Washington, D.C.,” such as the one that created the controversial Basin and Range National Monument in southern Nevada earlier this year.

A poll commissioned by the Outdoor Industry Association allegedly showed voters in Nevada and Colorado wanted to keep virtually all public lands in the hands of the Feds, but I think the Association received the results it paid for. That’s how things work in Washington, D.C.

Guy W. Farmer, who grew up in Seattle, is a card-carrying westerner.