A section of the Republican megabill pending in the U.S. Senate would require the government to sell some of the public land in Alaska and 10 other states, to build housing.
The Senate's draft budget reconciliation bill doesn’t specify which property would be sold but it requires the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to offload at least 0.5% of the acreage they manage, and as much as 0.75%.
That amounts to 2 million or 3 million acres across Alaska and the West, said Blaine Miller-McFeeley of Earthjustice.
“This is an unprecedented and massive land sell-off," he said. "It's a fire sale.”
The bill excludes a lot of federal land from eligibility for sale, such as National Parks, designated wilderness and national recreation areas. Miller-McFeeley said it still leaves a lot of beloved land vulnerable to the auction block.
Environmental groups are circulating maps showing vast tracts they say comprise the pool of lands from which the selections might be made.
A federal land sale sounds good to Ketchikan Gateway Borough Mayor Rodney Dial. About 98% of the borough is within the Tongass National Forest, and Dial said that prevents construction of much-needed housing, even on land the borough already owns.
“A great example of that would be we have about 250 acres or so in the Ward Cove area, which is kind of near where a cruise ship dock is. So its location next to an industrial area is ideal," he said. "But the problem is, is that property is landlocked.”
The borough needs about 50 acres of Forest Service land to develop the Ward Cove tract he said.
“We don't want big sections of the Forest Service, but if we had a few key locations, we could really access some of our borough land and open it up for housing," he said.
Environmental advocates say that while the bill says the land would be sold for housing, the property could end up logged or mined.
Alaska’s congressional delegation regularly introduces bills to privatize sections of federal land, or cede it to local governments. But the idea is alarming to Republicans in other western states. Congressman Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., for instance, President Trump’s first Interior secretary, helped defeat a similar provision when the House was crafting its budget reconciliation bill last month. He remains adamantly opposed, so it's not clear that section will remain in the bill.
Joe Plesha spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, said she is following the issue.
"There is a large volume of misinformation about this provision. As written, it would be restricted to a small percentage of BLM and Forest Service lands across the nation," he said by text. "Going forward, we will continue to track this provision, but we will be relying on the legislative text to understand it, not highly misleading maps and arguments made by groups that reflexively oppose any sale of federal land.”
