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Tom Lopez's avatar

No! There is no equivalancy in the sanctity of public access between on State of Idaho school sections and Federal public lands. State land is always subject to potential sales by the land board which has constitutional mandates governing the profitable use of the land. This proposal is a smoke and mirrors distraction. Protect public land and access. If public lands are sold they will be bought by billionaires and corporations who will in turn squeeze out private ranch owners and consolidate huge tracts of private land. No more hunting, fishing, hiking, mushroom collecting, camping without paying some entity an absorbent fee for the privilege of using what once belonged to everyone. This proposal would lead to the Texafication of Idaho.

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Dave Britton's avatar

The swap model doesn't work except to cut taxes for the very wealthy. Say we have a state endowment section that is for logistical or location reasons very hard to use for timber harvest, so it is producing nothing for the school budget. Also we have a BLM patch that is very desirable for private use but is not for sale. So we swap their ownerships. Now the desirable patch is state endowment land and the hard to use patch is BLM. The state has two options: 1: harvest the desirable patch annually and give the proceeds to the school budget, or 2:sell the desirable patch for private ownership, and give this one-time only windfall to the school budget. The first option would be fine, it's what we mostly do now, but the second option reduces public lands and prevents any ongoing income stream from the harvesting (or other income-generating public use, e.g. camping, fishing, hunting permit sales, etc. that could benefit the school budget). So it is selling your birthright for a mess of pottage, to put it Biblically. Our current legislators would sell in a heartbeat, but even the one time sale doesn't really help the schools, it just allows the legislators to allocate that much less from tax revenue to cover the school budget, giving a tax break that primarily benefits the wealthy, who pay more in taxes (at least theoretically). So this proposal is a shell game that pretends to make things better but only makes them worse. Swapping ownership of non-income producing school endowment land for harvestable BLM land IS a good idea, because it benefits the commons and keeps both in public ownership. However, we shouldn't allow or enable or facilitate sale of the public commons to private ownership. That is something that hurts us all in order to benefit only one undeserving buyer. Don't listen to the smooth talking lawyer lobbyists for the wealthy, or the heresy spouting pseudo-Christian nationalists looking to capture the 7th Mountain.

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