Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah.

Gale Dick's June 21 column in The Tribune on myths is, well, full of them.

Dick's portrayal of Western public land policy is premised on three fallacies: 1) a selective telling of history, 2) an absence of context, and 3) a lack of confidence in Utahns.

The concern with public lands and the reason "sagebrush rebels" fight for greater control over our lands actually goes all the way back to the Equal Footing Doctrine in the Constitution.

Article IV of the Constitution allows all states to join the original states as legal and political equals. As with other Western states, when Utah's enabling act (the law that established Utah's statehood status) was approved by Congress in 1894, it stated that land was ceded until such time as the federal government "shall" dispose of the land. Western states, including Utah, were promised 5 percent of the proceeds from land disposal to fund public education and infrastructure.

The plain language of these enabling acts proclaims that the public lands "shall be sold by the United States." There was no "may" or "might" about it; the land was to be disposed of by the national government. The United States honored the language until the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, wherein Congress, with a majority of votes coming from the East, declared that the policy of the United States was to retain public lands in federal ownership and management.

The federal

Advertisement
government's disposal philosophy was abandoned and the importance of the Constitution's equal footing concept was ignored. As a result, the West came up on the short end of the stick. We never got the land or the compensation we were due. That's not a myth. That's a fact.

It's partially this reality that leads the "Cowboy Caucus" to the belief that the United States has broken its solemn compact with the Western states, and breached its fiduciary duty to the schoolchildren who are designated beneficiaries of the sale of public lands.

The second flaw in Dick's analysis is the lack of context. Most people don't realize that the federal government currently owns 653 million acres in the United States. That means nearly one out of every three acres in this country is owned and controlled by the federal government.

However, these federal lands are not spread equally across the country. Roughly 90 percent of federal land is located in Western states. Put another way, all states east of an imaginary vertical line from Montana to New Mexico have, on average, 4 percent of their land federally owned, while the Western states, on average, have 51 percent of their land federally owned.

Four Western states (including Utah) have more than 60 percent of the land within their borders controlled by the federal government. By comparison, the District of Columbia, established by the Constitution as the federal city, has only 24.7 percent of its total acreage owned by the federal government.

Perhaps most galling of all, despite the enormous land holdings already in its portfolio, the federal government continues to spends millions of dollars each year to acquire additional land. In fact, over the past 40 years, the federal government has spent nearly $13 billion adding hundreds of thousands of acres to the federal estate. An area larger than the size of Florida has been added since John F. Kennedy was president.

Finally, the issue of control over Utah land boils down to an issue of trust. Some, such as Dick, apparently believe only the federal bureaucracy can manage lands in Utah, that anyone in Washington, D.C., must be inherently smarter than anyone in Utah. I work there, and I don't buy that myth.

Bottom line: I believe Utahns can be trusted to manage the lands within our state in a better and more responsible fashion. The feds should give us a chance.

Rep. Rob Bishop , a Republican, represents the First Congressional District in Utah.