Nevada’s federal land problem

By Anahit Baghshetsyan

Asking permission to use your land? Welcome to Nevada.

Draw a line through any town in a Clark County rural area, Lincoln, White Pine or Eureka County, and you will quickly notice a trend: As soon as you leave the main street, the land belongs to the federal government. The BLM controls around 85% of the land in the Silver State, more than any other state in the nation. In practice, this means that bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., get to make vital decisions about what happens to housing, economic growth and agriculture in Nevada.

The impact of monopolistic land ownership is not a mere abstraction. BLM land ownership is why ranchers must wait months for grazing decisions, why developers cannot afford to build as much housing and why there are parcels of empty land in the middle of urban areas in the state. However, this was not supposed to be the case.

Nevada entered the union in 1864 on the premise that its lands, although controlled by the federal government, would be sold, homesteaded and placed in productive hands. Later, Washington changed its mind. In 1976, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act reversed the practice of transfer by declaring that public lands would be managed by the government indefinitely. In 1996, Nevadans answered accordingly, with an overwhelming majority of the state voting to strike the disclaimer of public lands from our constitution. Although passed and approved by both the legislature and the voters, the change cannot take place without a congressional vote or a federal court ruling. But Congress has been busy ignoring it for the past 30 years.

The case for transferring the lands to Nevada and Nevadans is not just about historical promises. For every acre the federal government holds in Nevada, a business loses a chance to expand, a rancher misses out on cattle and a family cannot build a house. Decisions affecting local communities should be made by them, not by remote federal agencies.

Nevada is trapped by a land ownership pattern that was never designed for a growing state. No other state is asked to build a future for a growing population of more than three million residents on 15% of its land. Is that the equal footing that all states are guaranteed in the Constitution?

Ranchers, builders and counties of the Silver State have spent three decades waiting for Washington to recognize its sovereign and democratic will. It is time that the federal government stopped requiring Nevadans to ask permission before using their very own land.

Anahit Baghshetsyan is a Policy Analyst with Nevada Policy.