Land Sales Aimed at Fueling Growth

This was territory nobody wanted -- not homesteaders, not city dwellers, not even the railroads. It remained the big empty: a state-sized expanse of sagebrush, canyon lands and jagged mountains left almost entirely to the federal government.

But now Nevada’s Lincoln County, a 10,637-square-mile piece of the lonely Old West, might be headed for a bit of a New West boom. “Let us grow. Let us develop our water. Let us bring in some industry,” pleads County Commissioner Tim Perkins.

The Nevada congressional delegation is doing its best to oblige. In June, members introduced a bill that would ease the way for hundreds of miles of water pipelines across federal land and carve out 87,000 acres of public holdings -- the equivalent of nearly three San Franciscos -- to sell for private development around the county’s scattered little communities.

Big enough to swallow New Hampshire and Rhode Island, Lincoln County is home to fewer than 5,000 people. An air of abandonment hangs over many of its settlements. Occasional gas stations and small markets are strung along the roads. Ranchers in pickups rumble up to tiny cafes veiled in homemade curtains to hear the local gossip.

With about 1,800 residents, Pioche -- the county seat and historic silver-mining center a three-hour drive northeast of Las Vegas -- is as bustling as the county gets.

The proposal to sell off federal land here is the latest in a series of congressional acts, launched in 1998, that are helping fuel southern Nevada’s explosive expansion. The approach Nevada officials are pushing is being eyed as a model in other Western states where the federal government controls huge swaths of land.

Originally designed to divest the U.S. Bureau of Land Management of property it owned around the Las Vegas Strip -- so-called urban islands that didn’t make sense for a wild-land management agency to keep -- the Nevada land bills now reach beyond the metropolitan fringe into distant desert.

Members of Congress from Nevada promise more to come as they move to pare the federal government’s historic share of their state.

“We have 17 counties. We have 15 to go after this,” vowed the Senate’s second highest-ranking Democrat, Harry Reid of Nevada, who with others in the delegation intends to draw up similar bills for every county in the state.

In addition to selling federal land, the bills funnel portions of the proceeds to local and state government to subsidize any ensuing growth. The Lincoln bill would hand 45% of the sales revenue to county government to foster economic development -- a bigger share for locals than granted in any previous southern Nevada legislation.

“This is a fairness issue here,” said Rep. Jim Gibbons, a Nevada Republican who has been pushing to give local and state government a larger piece of the revenue pie.

“Everything that you and I rely on for our county government to do,” he said, “they struggle with, because there is no private land there and no tax base. There aren’t many people, but they are spread out. They still need roads, they still need a court system, they still need schools.”

Where Gibbons sees equity, others see a giant giveaway of public resources.

“It’s a big-time lands bill, set up to facilitate development in a part of Nevada that doesn’t have the resources or water to support it,” objected ecologist Daniel Patterson of the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, one of several environmental groups opposed to the Lincoln proposal.

“You’re talking about selling a national asset -- land that belongs to the American people -- and the money goes into the pocket of the county.”

The legislation taps into a resentment of the federal government’s pervasive presence that is deeply rooted in Nevada. Bypassed by homesteaders for more hospitable territory, most of the state remained in federal hands after the frontier’s closing.

Today, Nevadans recite land ownership statistics like an angry dirge: 86% is controlled by the federal government, a greater percentage than in any other state in the nation. In Lincoln County, the figure is 98%.

“Nevada is very much like a colonial possession in terms of control of the actual land,” said Eric Herzik, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. “To speak of the county is almost laughable. It’s a swath of federal land.” The land legislation, he said, is a way to redress a historical imbalance.

But as the auctions spread beyond the booming Las Vegas Valley, some environmentalists say they are creating a dangerous national model and promoting leap-frog growth in a state already in the grip of a historic drought and clamoring for more water.

“There’s a reason most of Nevada belongs to the public: It’s very arid,” Patterson said. “Nevada is one of those states where the environment can’t support a lot of development.”

Environmental activists are especially critical of the Lincoln bill’s water provisions, which they contend would speed groundwater development that could dry up eastern Nevada.

The legislation is “the first step in re-creating the Owens Valley, with its economic and environmental disasters,” said Rose Strickland of the Sierra Club’s Toiyabe Chapter, referring to the slice of eastern California that Los Angeles has drained for nearly a century.

The Lincoln bill would establish rent-free rights of way for an extensive network of water pipelines on public land. One 256-mile-long corridor would be assigned to the Southern Nevada Water Authority. The regional provider has filed claims with the state engineer to tap large amounts of groundwater from a deep aquifer underlying eastern and southern Nevada and pump it to Las Vegas. Environmentalists worry that the pumping would threaten the Desert National Wildlife Refuge -- a large portion of which is in southwest Lincoln County -- as well as water supplies in Death Valley National Park and rural eastern Nevada.

Another pipeline route -- 192 miles long -- would be granted to Lincoln County, which has a deal with a private firm, Vidler Water Co., to develop local groundwater supplies to serve growth.

Southern Nevada water officials note that under the legislation, environmental reviews must be conducted.

“It doesn’t in any way circumvent the process, but allows us to hone in where the utility corridor will be,” said Pat Mulroy, executive director of the water authority. “It will save us some time. Five years is a good ballpark figure.”

The proposal would also move an existing federal utility right of way from a large private tract in the southern part of the county -- on which a long-time friend of Reid wants to build a new town -- and place it at the edge of the desert wildlife refuge.

The legislation additionally attempts to override a court decision by ordering the Bureau of Land Management to proceed with the sale of almost 13,500 acres on the county’s southeastern border, near the town of Mesquite. The auctions, authorized in an earlier bill, were blocked this year by a federal judge, who found that the environmental impact of developing the acreage had not been documented adequately.

To Charles Wilkinson, it all smacks of the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, the failed 1970s movement by Nevada and other states to wrest control of public lands from the federal government.

“It’s in a somewhat different guise but very recognizable,” said Wilkinson, a University of Colorado Law School professor and expert on public lands.

“What you have, instead of a recognition that federal public lands are there for all of us -- are there to create open space -- you have flat-out sales of public lands,” he said. “Second, you have a real cave-in to local interests, as opposed to national interests. And third, you’ve got an emphasis on water development.”

Reid says that he’s no sagebrush rebel, but that his state, the home of the nation’s nuclear test site and proposed nuclear waste repository, deserves some relief from federal dominance.

“I opposed the Sagebrush Rebellion. I think what we’re doing is very sensible and incremental and is being done with a great deal of thought,” he said. “And when it’s all over, we’ll have some beautiful wilderness areas.”

Along with authorizing land auctions, the bills set aside federal land for wilderness protection. The Lincoln County proposal would establish more than 750,000 acres of wilderness, including prized canyon lands and snow-peaked mountain ranges that belie the state’s stereotype as barren desert.

That approach -- combining land sales and wilderness designations in one package -- is catching attention elsewhere in the West.

Inspired by the Nevada legislation, Rep. Michael K. Simpson (R-Idaho) is drafting a bill to create about 300,000 acres of wilderness in the central part of his state while giving more than 1,000 acres of national forest -- some of it in a congressionally designated national recreation area and worth millions of dollars -- to the local county to sell for development.

Such linkages place conservationists in an awkward position. But some say they may be the only way to gain protections for wilderness areas.

“Certainly our preference would be a pure wilderness bill,” said Shaaron Netherton, executive director of Friends of Nevada Wilderness. “I think in a state like Nevada that’s a difficult thing.”

Nobody expects the Lincoln County land to be snapped up at the sizzling pace or prices set by the Las Vegas auctions. But, says County Commissioner Perkins, “I know from talking to developers there is a lot of interest.”

He envisions second homes sprouting in Pioche and in the county’s southern tier, where he lives -- spillover development from Las Vegas.

Perkins, who drives 90 miles one way to work hauling dirt at Las Vegas construction sites, points to the state map. “If Vegas is moving north,” he asks, “where are they are going first?”