Federal public lands in Colorado eligible for sale under Republicans’ current budget bill include a popular mountain biking area outside of Grand Junction, a beloved hiking area in Durango’s backyard and thousands of acres of forest abutting the Front Range’s Brainard Lake Recreation Area and Indian Peak Wilderness.
More than 14 million acres of federal public land in Colorado could be eligible for sale if Congress passes the current version of the budget bill mandating the sale of a fraction of the nation’s public lands, an analysis by The Wilderness Society found. The eligible parcels cover chunks of mountain, foothills and plains along the Front Range and the Western Slope.
The budget draft requires the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service to sell between 0.5% and 0.75% of the 438 million acres the agencies manage across the West — up to 3.3 million acres, or 5,100 square miles. It exempts certain lands from sale, including national monuments, wilderness areas, national conservation areas, national parks and national recreation areas. Public lands with existing mining or drilling rights would also be exempted.
Republican leadership pitched the land sales as a way to generate revenue and make more land available for housing, though the bill contains no provisions requiring proposed housing to be affordable. The bill states the agencies should prioritize the sale of lands that are nominated by states or local governments, are adjacent to existing development and infrastructure, and are suitable for residential housing.
Nearly all of the proceeds from the sales — estimated at between $5 billion and $10 billion over the next decade — would go to the U.S. Treasury.
The provision sparked broad and fierce criticism from Colorado conservation and recreation communities as well as the state’s Democratic delegation in Congress. Coloradans’ businesses, ways of life and identity rely on public lands, they said.
Public lands are Americans’ birthright and a unique treasure that can be accessed by all, Tony Prendergast, a Colorado rancher and member of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, said in a call with reporters Friday.
“There is nothing like this issue that will fire up people like me to get involved politically,” he said. “The depth of the anger I feel and the disappointment in those elected officials who are putting this proposal forward and those who will support it is just intense for me.”
Lawmakers over the weekend expanded the eligibility of lands for sale by removing a definition that specified what types of leases exempted land from sale, said Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director at The Wilderness Society. The text no longer explicitly exempts lands with grazing leases, which cover millions of acres across the West.
The revision to the bill also strengthened requirements that the sold land be used for housing or “infrastructure to support local housing needs.” Previously, it allowed the land to be used for broader “community needs.” It also removed language that required agencies to prioritize selling tracts that were difficult to manage because of their remoteness.
After the exemptions are accounted for, approximately 14 million acres of public land are eligible for sale in Colorado, according to The Wilderness Society’s analysis.
On the Western Slope, eligible lands include chunks of BLM land north of Blue Mesa Reservoir and along the Gunnison River below the reservoir’s output. Swaths of land in the Book Cliffs immediately north of Palisade could be for sale, as well as the popular Lunch Loops mountain bike trail system outside Grand Junction. Durango’s beloved Animas Mountain recreation space is eligible, as is land along the scenic U.S. 550 between Durango and Silverton — known as the Million Dollar Highway.
In the Arkansas River Valley, thousands of acres would be eligible across the Sawatch Range west of Twin Lakes, Buena Vista and Salida. Another large tract covers a huge chunk of mountains north of Aspen, and another nearly all the mountains immediately east of Steamboat Springs, which serve as popular camping, hiking and biking areas.
Closer to the Front Range, nearly all of the Forest Service land in the hills west of the Interstate 25 corridor between Castle Rock and Colorado Springs is eligible. Forest Service land abutting the eastern borders of the popular Brainard Lake Recreation Area and Indian Peaks Wilderness would be eligible as well.
Because the bill prioritizes land near communities, it could threaten the lands most accessible and most used by Coloradans, said Carroll, who lives in Durango and frequently visits Animas Mountain.
“The big loser is people’s recreation and outdoor space that we all go to on a regular basis,” he said. “The real impact is on local communities.”
The Senate proposal follows a failed amendment to the House version of the budget that would have sold more than 500,000 acres of public land in Utah and Nevada. The amendment was later stripped from the House draft — in part due to opposition from Western Republicans.
Rep. Jeff Hurd, who represents the sprawling 3rd Congressional District, was the only member of Colorado’s Republican House delegation to oppose the measure or speak publicly about public lands sales. In a previous interview with The Denver Post, he said he opposed the large-scale sale of public lands without local input but eventually voted in favor of the larger package because his concerns about the land sale did not outweigh the parts of the bill he liked.
Other Senate committees are still working this week on their pieces of the budget bill as Republicans work to pass a final version in the coming weeks.
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