A bill that would make it a third-degree felony to bid at an land-lease auction with no intent to pay sailed through its first legislative test Tuesday and now goes to the full House.

HB437, a response to a University of Utah student's headline-grabbing disruption of a federal oil- and gas-lease auction in December, would apply to any competitive lease sale involving property for natural-resource or agricultural production.

The bill focuses on intent and does not address those who might unintentionally fail to pay for winning bids. Conviction would carry a minimum mandatory $7,500 fine.

Bill sponsor Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, did not mention Tim DeChristopher by name, but clearly was referring to the U. student when he noted the activist recently spoke to a Utah audience about his monkey-wrenching of a U.S. Bureau of Land Management lease sale.

"A lot of people [were] cheering," Noel said. "That's wrong."

Noel also made a glancing reference to "environmental terrorism," saying, "There are more and more of these cases coming forward. … You read about this all the time."

He did not elaborate.

DeChristopher, 27, won bids worth $1.8 million and admitted he inflated other bids he didn't win to the tune of $500,000 as an act of what he called civil disobedience.

The U.S. attorney's office in Salt Lake City is investigating the case, which would have to be taken to a grand jury as part of a prosecution.

Rep. Mel Brown, R-Coalville, said he supported the bill but asked whether the state had the authority to regulate the federal government.

A legislative attorney said federal prosecutors regularly use state laws in dealing with civil cases -- for example, when considering damages from forest fires -- so the portion of the state law dealing with the fine was applicable. How the state law might affect a federal criminal prosecution, however, remains unclear.