Our Wide Open Spaces
WYANT, WILLIAM K. Jr.
Public Lands at Stake Our Wide Open Spaces by WILLIAM K. WYANT, JR. The Public Land Law Review Commission, set up by Congress in 1964, is working frantically these days to finish a report that...
...The Hoover panel wanted to give away the surface rights only, reserving the minerals...
...What should be the fate of the land that belongs to the people...
...If he wants title, the law offers means whereby he can own the land for $5 an acre or less...
...Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel put off an increase in grazing fees scheduled for this year, saying he wanted to await the recommendations of the PLLRC...
...Congress took no action and let the matter slide...
...Unlike "SALT" and "GATT" and "MIRV" and "ABM" in foreign policy and military affairs, it confounds the headline writer and drives the reader to the comic pages...
...In other quarters the law is condemned as a standing invitation to miners to come on the public's property, ravage it at will, and take the mineral wealth without payment...
...Congress set a monumental task, reminiscent of the Emperor Justinian's simplification of Roman law...
...Progressives consider Senator Jackson a powerful offset to Aspinall, but Jackson is often busy elsewhere...
...Thus, when the Interior Department raffled off the Santa Barbara offshore tracts in competitive bidding a couple of years ago, it was in a position to receive more than $600,000,000 in bonuses plus a share of the resources extracted...
...Maurice K. Goddard, secretary of forests for the state of Pennsylvania...
...Robert Emmet Clark, a law professor at the University of Arizona and specialist in land and water use...
...At the same time that Congress established the 1964 Commission, it passed the Classification and Multiple Use Act authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to determine which of the public lands ought to be retained and which sold and disposed of...
...There is a great deal at stake...
...Another observer disagreed, predicting the conclusions will be surprisingly incisive...
...From its inception, the Commission has been heavily weighted on the side of private users of the public lands, and it has been condemned by its title to an insignificant amount of newspaper attention...
...For another, the law provided specifically for loading the "advisory council" with representatives of mining, timber, coal, oil, utility, and other interests...
...The Public Land Law Review Commission, set up by Congress in 1964, is working frantically these days to finish a report that must be in the hands of Congress and President Nixon by June 30...
...Before Democratic Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall left office early last year, he damned the mining law, terming it "a blatant giveaway of resources that should be managed in the long-term national interest...
...The PLLRC itself has nineteen members including its elected chairman, Aspinall, the seventy-three-year-old Colorado Democrat who long has headed the House Interior Committee...
...Counting the National Forests and National Parks, the military reservations, the bombing ranges, and all other public lands, Uncle Sam owns about 770,000,000 acres, or one-third of the total land area of the nation...
...The other Presidential appointees, credited with seldom missing a meeting, are former Governor Philip Hoff of Vermont...
...This meant that the Government started receiving rents and royalties for those minerals, and a few others added later...
...The act providing for a new and comprehensive review began as follows: "It is hereby declared to be the poU icy of Congress that the public lands of the United States shall be (a) retained and managed or (b) disposed of, all in a manner to provide the maximum benefit for the general public...
...In addition, the Commission has six members of the Senate Interior Committee, including the Committee chairman, Senator Henry M. Jackson, Washington Democrat, and six from Aspinall's House Committee, including at leas...
...He could confound his liberal detractors by turning out a document that champions the public interest...
...The nation's lawgivers laid it down that PLLRC—or "Plerk," as some call it-must peruse all existing statutes and regulations governing the public lands, review Federal policies and practices, determine present and future demands on the lands, and recommend changes aimed at giving the general public maximum benefit...
...The quality of the stew being prepared by the Public Land Law Review Commission cannot be fairly judged until it is off the stove...
...Yet the subject matter with which the Commission, whose chairman is Representative Wayne Aspinall of Colorado, has been dealing is of importance to anyone interested in the future of the country...
...However, in the case of metallic minerals such as copper, iron, gold, silver, lead, zinc, antimony, and bismuth, and certain non-metallic minerals, the application of the old law means that the miner still has a free ride...
...What should be retained and what disposed of...
...Even the mining industry thinks changes are in order...
...An important one is the needed revision of the antiquated and harmful 1872 Mining Law...
...The entire Federal spread is big enough—if one threw the mountain peaks, glaciers, bogs, pastureland, and desert into one colossal grab bag—for every man, woman, and child in the country to have three acres of it...
...For one thing, the Interior Committees of the Senate and House tend to reflect' a Western, user-oriented attitude toward the public lands...
...is a staff writer for the Washington bureau of the St...
...That would be as easy as sneaking the sun past a Kansas rooster...
...About half the money has gone for studies farmed out under contract to universities and other agencies...
...The Commission, some say, cannot possibly ingest the inchoate mass of studies and conflicting viewpoints and will come out with geperalities that do not bite, one way or the other...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...The U.S...
...Critics complain that some are of dubious quality...
...The staff director is Milton A. Pearl, former aide to Aspinall on the House committee...
...Nancy E. Smith, member of the board of supervisors of San Bernardino County, California...
...More than half of these holdings are the so-called "public domain" lands that have never left Federal ownership and have not been dedicated to a specific, permanent use...
...There are similar questions to be resolved as to logging on the public lands and the taking of other resources and benefits...
...The Commission's elected vice chairman is H. Byron Mock, a Salt Lake City lawyer and former Federal official whose presence, like that of Aspinall, is a comfort to the mining industry and other user groups...
...The system clutters the West with claims that are difficult to track down and clear away, and it frustrates Government efforts to keep the land from being despoiled...
...It also provided a voice for conservation, recreation, and sports people, but the conservationists consider themselves heavily outnumbered...
...As chief cook, Aspinall has played the dominant role...
...Out of all this travail should come, at best, intelligent and constructive guidance on some exceedingly tough problems involving clashes between the private and the public interest...
...There were grassroots hearings on this subject...
...In these times of concern about the environment, the Commission could hardly get away with a move back toward the Jurassic Age...
...Before the current Commission began its work, there had been three reviews of the public land laws—in 1879, in 1904, and in 1931...
...Laurance S. Rockefeller of New York, a proponent of natural beauty...
...This will be the first review charged with looking at all the public land laws and resources at one time, including those of Alaska, the Outer Continental Shelf, and the Federal mineral interest in lands that have gone to other ownership, which may be state or other jurisdictions or private...
...In 1920 Congress passed the Mineral Leasing Act, providing for oil, oil shale, gas, coal, phosphate, and sodium to be put on a lease basis...
...The miner goes in and makes his claim and may remove and sell the minerals without payment to the Government...
...In any event, conservationists both on and outside the Commission are watching carefully, and if they are unhappy with the official report they may turn out a critique and survey of their own...
...My guess is they are going to be for motherhood," one veteran bureaucrat remarked...
...The mining law is a holdover from the free-and-easy days of the Nineteenth Century when the West was opening up...
...Chairman Aspinall has said he wants a unanimous report...
...The extent of these public lands is amazing...
...The same point arises on use of grazing lands...
...A basic issue with respect to mining is whether the managers of the public lands, notably the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, shall be able to get the fair market value for what is removed by private entrepreneurs...
...Mock is one of six commissioners named by former President Johnson...
...Not everybody was happy that a groundswell of public opinion developed in favor of retention of most of the public lands...
...The map of the Western states is brilliantly hued if one splashes with color the areas that are Federally owned...
...Congress authorized $7,300,000 for the review...
...The Aspinall Commission is to provide guidance on such broad questions...
...It is worth recalling that the 1931 report, made by a committee appointed by President Hoover at the outset of the Great Depression, urged in its chief recommendation "that Congress pass an act granting to the respective states all the unreserved, unappropriated public domain within their respective boundaries" if the legislatures of the states were willing...
...On what terms should private or commercial interests be allowed to get at the public's timber and minerals and forage...
...Backing up the Commission are a thirty-three-member advisory council, governors' representatives from the fifty states, and a Commission staff that totaled fifty-four at one time but in recent weeks, as the work nears completion, had dwindled to about thirty-six...
...Some who have watched the Commission at its work are fearful that its job has been so big and complex that what emerges in the report this summer will not reflect a genuine "deliberation in depth...
...Government owns nearly ninety-seven per cent of Alaska, eighty-six per cent of Nevada, sixty-six per cent of Utah, sixty-four per cent of Idaho, more than half of Oregon, and nearly half of California...
...There is something about the acronym "PLLRC" that repels the casual reader...
...Even the mining industry thinks changes are in order...
...He is the Great Mogul of the Western range...
...Policies that encouraged settlers to move onto the land and develop it made sense...
...two considered heartily sympathetic to conservationist objectives, Morris K. Udall, Arizona Democrat, and the liberal Republican from Pennsylvania, John P. Saylor...
...These studies have accumulated in massive piles...
...Congress returned to the problem in 1964, hopeful of putting in order the multiplicity of laws and administrative practices—thousands and thousands of them, sometimes conflicting— governing the public lands...
...The whole enterprise has been set up in such a way as to minimize any danger that the Commission, in its enthusiasm for furthering the public interest, will neglect the private...
...and Mrs...
Vol. 34 • May 1970 • No. 5
