By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
Nevada State Senator, and 2014 candidate for Lieutenant Governor, Mark Hutchison gave a presentation on the economic benefits that could result in transferring public lands from federal to state control during a special panel discussion held Friday at the Western Republican Leadership Conference in Salt Lake City.
The panel discussion, which included U.S. Representative Rob Bishop (R-Utah) and state lawmakers from Montana, Nevada and Utah, was held in a chandeliered ballroom in front of an audience of about 150 people. It included a broad discussion about how the states, as well as the public lands, could benefit from bringing the management under more local control.
In his presentation, Hutchison was asked to speak on how state education systems and other services could benefit from the transfer of public lands from federal management to state.
In an interview with the Progress following his presentation, Hutchison said that, during his time in the State Senate, he has been heavily focused on public lands issues. It is also a central part of his current campaign for Lieutenant Governor, he said.
“I’ve made the transfer of public lands one of my platforms in the campaign,” he said. “I’ve been promoting and championing that for a long time, and I’ve been working in the efforts to build a coalition between western states to do that.”
Hutchison is a member of the American Lands Council, a group of policy-makers, legislators and interested parties that are focusing on the transfer of federal lands back to the states.
“I’ve been involved in this for quite a while,” he said.
He pointed out that 8 out of 10 acres in the state of Nevada constitute public lands under federal control. That’s a high number, even compared to other western states, he said.
“Many states in the west have a lot more state trust lands than we do in Nevada,” Hutchison said.
Hutchison added that as one looks at state trust lands, which encompasses lands granted to a state when it was initially made a state, Nevada only has about 3,000 acres. That’s compared to neighboring states like Arizona that has over 9 million acres, Utah with 3 million acres and New Mexico with nearly 9 million acres, Hutchison said.
“We don’t have any state trust lands like other western states,” Hutchison said. “Couple that with the amount of land that is controlled by the federal government, well over 80 percent, and we just don’t have a lot of available land to provide resources that a lot of other states do.”
In the panel discussion, Hutchison presented findings from a report by the Nevada Public Land Management Task Force. This report had been presented, just the day before, to the Nevada Legislative Committee on Public Lands at a meeting in Tonopah. This bipartisan task force, made up of County Commissioners from each of Nevada’s counties, was created by the 2013 Legislature to look at the feasibility and benefits in the possible transfer of more lands from federal to state control.
The report found that the state of New Mexico had generated over $500 million in revenues with its state managed lands.
“In 2012, New Mexico brought in $544 million from its state managed land and put it into its public schools,” Hutchison said. “And they did that with 153 full times employees to manage that land.”
By contrast, the report looked at BLM management of Nevada lands and found that it had a loss of $31 million during the same year; and had 735 full time employees, Hutchison said.
How much does that translate into public lands revenue lost for Nevada? The study looked at the four western states of Utah, Idaho, Arizona and New Mexico to see how each state managed its state lands. The task force was able to come up with an average dollar figure per acre that the states generated in revenue from public lands. This was then applied to Nevada if some of the public lands were released from federal control to the state.
“If we were to transfer just 4 million acres of BLM land over to Nevada, using those four state averages, it would come out to over $114 million in added revenues to the state,” Hutchison said. “And that land is all pretty low hanging fruit. It just includes land that has already been identified as available for disposal.”
That is using numbers from the four states in an average economic cycle of a five year period. Under a worst case scenario, using only the lowest economic times and the worst circumstances, the revenues for Nevada under this scenario would still be in the $31 million range, the report states.
“On the other hand, if we could transfer all of the BLM land in the state over to the state of Nevada, using that same four state average model, it would be over $1.5 billion per year in added revenues,” Hutchison said.
Hutchison pointed out that the Task Force had not recommended transferring lands bearing special designations such as Wilderness, National Conservation Areas and National Parks. Also out of consideration were lands administered by the Department of Energy, Department of Defense and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he said.
Hutchison believes that this issue will be an important one for the next Lieutenant Governor of the state.
“One of the major roles of the Lieutenant Governor is to promote economic develpment and job creation in the state,” Hutchison said. “I’ll tell you what, if you want to have a boom in the state of Nevada and create jobs, free up this federal land to the states and let the states decide whether we want to continue to use the land for public use or put it into the hands of individuals and entrepreneurs. If we do that, it will increase the tax base in the state before having to raise anyone’s taxes.”
