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Doing well by doing good
National Review, Sept 14, 1992
LIKE B-movie monsters, the Federal Government, which already holds the deed to most of the terrain in a couple of Western states, along with vast stretches in all the others, keeps devouring more, taking western acreage off local property-tax rolls and subjecting it to long-distance, command-and-control management. The idea that the central government should be the No. 1 land baron might have been rejected in the former outposts of Communism, but it's alive and well in the American West; and if locals don't appreciate having orders barked to them by absentee federal landlords, well, tough for them.
A new audit from the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of the Interior suggests a whiff of scandal around this never-ending land grab. It seems the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have been using "non-profit" outfits as fronts in land deals. Groups like the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy, which historically have had an easier time than the feds in winning the trust of private landowners, will secure the initial options to purchase, only to transfer the land to Uncle Sam, often at a handsome profit. A couple of examples: after the Nature Conservancy paid $100 for an option to buy 5,529 acres in Oregon, the BLM gave the organization $1.5 million, of which the conservancy paid the owner $1.26 million, pocketing the rest--a cool $140,000. In another Oregon transaction, the BLM paid the Trust for Public Land $1 million, out of which that group gave a landowner $720,000--a sweet 38 per cent profit.
Overall, three federal agencies spent nearly a billion dollars between 1986 and 1991 to gobble up land, with nonprofit middlemen often doing nicely in the process. Whether laws were broken is unclear, but the unseemliness rates more than the yawns emanating from the media and Capitol Hill. Apparently for these tribunes of the public interest, government shenanigans aren't of any concern when their effect is to make government grow.
COPYRIGHT 1992 National Review, Inc.
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