Trump fast-tracks more destruction
Plus: Details on Lee's scaled-back public land sell-off plan
🤯 Trump Ticker 😱
While everyone is up in arms over Sen. Mike Lee’s effort to turn over America’s public lands to real estate developers (scroll down for the latest), the Trump administration has been quietly rushing approvals of extractive projects on, yes, America’s public lands. The latest beneficiary of the Bureau of Land Management’s accelerated “energy emergency” — and law-skirting — permitting process is an oil-loading facility in the Uinta Basin in Utah.
The BLM launched its 14-day review of Coal Energy Group 2’s proposed Wildcat Loadout Facility expansion on June 18, meaning the agency will release its environmental analysis — along with its expected approval — within the next few days. Clearly this is not only inadequate for a proper review of the facility’s upstream and downstream impacts, but it also shuts out all public input.
The loadout facility is used to transfer Uinta Basin waxy crude oil from trucks into rail cars. The oil is then moved by rail across Colorado (and along the Colorado River) and south to Gulf Coast refineries equipped to handle this particular form of crude. The proposed expansion would increase the facility’s capacity by about 30,000 barrels per day, which in turn would enable drillers to produce more oil and would increase the size and frequency of oil-hauling trains rolling through Colorado.
“This fast-tracked, back-room approval process will harm Utah communities bearing the brunt of the danger from increased oil-tanker truck traffic,” said Deeda Seed with the Center for Biological Diversity in a written statement. “The Trump administration is also putting Colorado communities at risk from more oil tanker railcars traveling next to the already imperiled Colorado River.”
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
On June 23, the BLM approved Rattler Resource’s proposed Rogers Wash placer gold mining operation on 95 acres of unpatented mining claims near Wickenburg, Arizona.
The mine’s not particularly large: it would only employ, at most, six people. Yet it’s notable because it could herald a resurgence of mining in the area, where the industry once was active but faded out long ago. Also, placer mining is particularly water intensive, and the Wickenburg area — which is just northwest of the Phoenix metro area — is particularly dry.
Rattler Resources estimates the project will consume about 50 to 80 gallons of water per minute, on average, which adds up to about 34 million gallons per year that will be pumped from groundwater wells. It’s not an enormous amount (about 51 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth) at least when compared to, say, an alfalfa field’s or data center’s consumption. But it’s also not nothing, and has sparked concerns among residents and advocates, who also worry about the project’s effects on desert tortoise habitat, according to the Arizona Republic’s Joan Meiners.
Environmental advocates scored a bit of a victory last month when the Interior Office of Hearings and Appeals partially vacated the BLM’s 2018 approval of the Daneros uranium mine expansion and ordered the agency to reconsider aspects of its environmental review. The mine, which is in the White Canyon area just outside Bears Ears National Monument, is currently idle. It was owned by Energy Fuels but has since been acquired by IsoEnergy.
The decision was in response to the Grand Canyon Trust’s and Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance’s lawsuit seeking to reverse the approval. They argued that water from a shallow aquifer could enter the mine workings, and that the agency had not required an adequate monitoring plan to detect and address groundwater infiltration.
The BLM must now revisit the monitoring plan, but the rest of the approval remains in place. IsoEnergy has said it plans to restart the mine when market conditions warrant it.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
The summer is still young and there’s still water in most of the ditches and laterals in the Southwest — at least for now. Then there’s the Dryside in southwestern Colorado. It relies on water from the La Plata River, which in turn relies on snowpack in the La Plata Mountains. And the latter was pretty meagre this year, leading to similarly sparse flows in the river and the ditches it feeds.
That has manifested itself in the Dryside’s fields and can be seen via Sentinel Hub’s moisture index satellite imagery. The image below shows the Dryside in June of 2023, when there was still snow in the La Platas compared to the drier situation now. The blue indicates moisture levels (the blue line going in a diagonal from top right to the left is the La Plata River valley). As you can see, farmers were irrigating far more of their fields two years ago. Now it appears that most fields that are not in the river bottom are dried up.
Lee’s 🌵 Public Lands 🌲 Sell-off Bill Lives on
When I was a kid growing up in Durango, Colorado, my friends and I used to spend a lot of time in a place called Dry Gulch, a huge swath of open space right next to town. Juniper, piñon, and scrub-oak strewn shale hills rose up from a valley that had been heavily grazed historically, creating the conditions for runoff to carve a deep gully into the shale. It was perfect for bike riding, lizard-catching, sword battles, and camping out. It had no fences or no-trespassing signs — in our minds it was public land, a place where we were free to roam and be wild and be children.
Until it wasn’t. Turns out Dry Gulch, part of an old ranch, was not public at all. Early on in Durango’s big growth spurt but when I was still a teenager, a developer bought the land and, eventually, sold off lots for housing, robbing us of this open space and a little bit of our freedom and one of the things that made growing up in Durango special. Now Dry Gulch is a high-end neighborhood known as Rockridge. The one home currently for sale there is listed at $2.3 million; each of the houses that have sold there in recent years have fetched over $1 million.
This type of scenario will be repeated across the West if Congress passes Sen. Mike Lee’s bid to sell off public lands. While the expanse I played in wasn’t technically public land, it still served the same function, in that it was unfenced and unconfined open space. Those are the same type of tracts that would be privatized and developed and taken out of the public’s hands under Lee’s bill.
Yes, Lee scaled back his plan after the Senate parliamentarian slammed his initial proposal, but now we have the new version’s language, and can say that it still sucks. While it no longer targets more remote, wilderness-quality areas, it puts a big privatization bullseye on the cherished open spaces on the edge of communities — the places folks hike, bike, play, and go to escape the din of humanity.
Lee’s big changes are in line with the tweet published in the last Land Desk, and include:
The provision would mandate the privatization of not less than .25% (600,000 acres) and not more than .50% (1.2 million acres) of Bureau of Land Management land, to be located within five miles of “the border of a population center.” (The text doesn’t define “population center,” so we’re left on our own on this one.) National Forest land has been excluded from disposability.
Sold land “shall be used solely for the development of housing or to address any infrastructure and amenities to support local needs associated with housing.” There is no affordability requirement, nor is there further definition of “infrastructure and amenities.”
The agency may not sell land that is subject to “an existing grazing permit or lease; or a valid existing right that is incompatible with the development of housing or any infrastructure and amenities to support local needs associated with housing.” The first part is Lee’s attempt to get the public lands ranchers back on his side. The second brings up the question of whether active mining claims and oil and gas leases would be available for sale (it was assumed that they were excluded under the previous proposal).
I imagine this will ease the fears of folks who were worried about remote, backcountry spots being sold off to the highest bidder. And it may garner more support from East Coast housing advocates and the Abundance pushers, since theoretically it would only include tracts that are close to towns and cities and would be used for residential development.
But it doesn’t lessen my apprehension or outrage in the slightest, because it is these somewhat close-in places that I’ve always been most worried about. Taking them out of the public’s hands and developing with housing or related “amenities and infrastructure” would rob the nearby communities of valuable open space, while also encouraging leapfrog sprawl and more growth in water and resource-constrained areas.
Also, just as the conversion of the open space in Rockridge to a residential neighborhood did nothing to bring down the cost of Durango’s housing — it actually seemed to do the opposite — this privatization and development of public land will do nothing to alleviate the West’s housing affordability crisis. That’s because the housing crisis in most Western public lands gateway towns is not driven by a lack of land or even lack of housing. It’s driven by a lack of affordable housing, which in turn is driven by seemingly limitless demand from those who have enough cash to throw down a million bucks for a 1950s-era tract home within biking distance of good trails.
It’s important to remember that even if Congress doesn’t buy into Lee’s proposal, the general concept will live on. Earlier this year, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum expressed his desire to do pretty much the same thing administratively by transferring public lands within 10 miles of communities to local governments or other entities for housing. There’s no reason to think Burgum has given up on that one, despite all the opposition to Lee’s bid.
Exactly which parcels will be up for grabs depends somewhat on how one defines a population center. Perhaps it’s the same as a Census Designated Place (CDP), a locally recognized concentration of population with a name that is not part of any other place — which would include everything from Bluff, La Sal, and Boulder, Utah, to Las Vegas and Phoenix. Or it could be an Urban Place, which the Census defines as a CDP with at least 2,500 inhabitants.
If we go with the latter definition, then the following lands could end up on the auction block:
Phil’s World trail network and surrounding lands outside Cortez, Colorado;
Mesa tops on either side of Recapture Canyon near Blanding, Utah, along with some portions of the canyon itself (I wonder if Phil Lyman will protest the privatization of the canyon and resulting loss of public access?);
BLM parcels on the east, west, and south sides of Gunnison, Colorado, including most of the Hartman Rocks Recreation Area;
Animas Mountain and upper Horse Gulch/Raiders Ridge (including most of the Skyline trail);
Large swaths of land southwest of the Santa Fe airport in the Cieneguilla area;
Parcels east and west of Montrose, Colorado;
Big tracts of BLM outside of Mesquite, Elko, Overton, and Pahrump, Nevada;
Land near Black Canyon City, Arizona;
Parcels just outside Barstow, Ridgecrest, and Susanville, California;
BLM land near Yakima, Washington;
and thousands of acres of other BLM land outside communities big and small.
If you are familiar with these places, you have to ask yourself: Is someone really going to build affordable housing on, say, Animas Mountain? I don’t think so. Instead, these desirable tracts will draw big bids and the winning developers will slice them up into huge lots for a handful of multi-million-dollar homes. It will do nothing to address the housing crisis except to further exacerbate it, meaning this is yet another of the many, many giveaways to the wealthy in Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
Meanwhile, the elk and bears and mountain lions that call the place home along with the hikers, mountain bikers, and trail runners that frequent the area would be out of luck. And once the land is sold, the American public is never getting it back.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
We were just reminiscing yesterday about running around Durango with a passel of kids. Most of the time we didn’t know or care who was who, whose parents did what or who lived where. We just biked to Junction Creek and built forts or resurrected old inner tubes for floating the Animas. Open spaces for a passel of kids to explore is what fosters creativity, resilience and community. We must protect that for all of us but especially kids.
One thing I don't see noted in most assessments of Lee's proposal is the potential of land locking access to other public lands. I'm the owner of a guide service in Kanab Utah and we see this in a few places where public land we would like to access is inaccessible because it is surrounded by private land and therefore"land locked". I would think this proposal would increase the potential for this.