The Outdoors

By Scott Rall, Outdoors Columnist

So, what does a lawsuit in Utah have to do with the citizens of Minnesota?  The answer is “plenty.” The state of Utah recently took its case to the United States Supreme Court to force the 18.5 million acres of Federal Land in Utah to be turned over to the state.

The lands in question are managed by the Federal Bureau of Land Management and are managed for grazing, mining and public recreation including hunting. The state of Utah transferred those acres to the federal government as a condition of being recognized for statehood many decades ago. The transfer of these lands to the state would result in the state being out of compliance with its own state constitution.

They are considered lands without a formal designation. This means they are not designated as a national forest or other federal terminology. The list is long but there are numerous areas in Utah with significant status and a long history of significant wildlife conservation and recreational value. Many national recreation areas would have been included in this land transfer.

The Court stated that these lands being held in federal ownership is not unconstitutional and refused to hear the state’s case. This ruling was celebrated by every conservation organization that operates in both Utah and all over the United States. It should be celebrated in Minnesota as well.

States have a terrible record when it comes to lands transferred from the federal government over to state management. The long and the short of it is that if history repeats itself many of, if not most, of these lands would be sold off to private ownership. What a person does on their own private land is pretty wide open. Private property rights are absolute and they should be for a wide variety of reasons.

I don’t think that private ownership would improve the ways these lands are managed for wildlife and wildlife habitat.

Take, for example, the school trust lands in Minnesota. When Minnesota became a state there was one section of land in every township designated to be managed for the benefit of schools and education. Hence the term school trust lands. When the ownership of those lands changed from the federal government to the state government, almost all of those lands were traded or sold off for lands of acres located in northern Minnesota that offered far less in the way of financial returns to each county. In fact, many school trust lands are made up of swamp and peat lands with little to no way to derive any income to benefit school operations.

There is a constant chant by some that the state currently owns too much land. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources manages 5.6 million acres in Minnesota. Of that total, 2.5 million acres are school trust lands. You can do the math, almost 50% of all lands managed by the MN DNR are lands the legislature has instructed them to keep and manage. Wildlife management areas, which we all use to hunt on, are a small portion of the 5.6 million they have oversite of.

So, what would happen if Utah had been successful? It would have opened the box for Utah and many other western states to repeat what has happened in Minnesota. Those lands would get parceled off and sold most likely. And to what end? More profit for a small number of those with enough money to purchase them. And then the efforts to extract as many dollars as possible with little to no care or concern for what happens to those lands when all of the profit is gone.

The momentum for this effort is temporarily suspended. But it is not by any means over. The Supreme Court’s ruling does not limit or restrict the state of Utah from filing the same lawsuit in a Federal District Court, which they may or may not do. It just requires them to use a different path than a straight to a Supreme Court for intervention. I do believe that with the current ruling, there may very well be less inertia to run headlong into another lawsuit with the outcome of their last effort.

Public lands, be they federal or state-managed, are the only places many of the rank-and-file average Joes and Joanns have to hunt and recreate. We need to be vigilant and watchful when issues like these arise in our great state, or any other state for that matter.

Public lands are a huge component of our quality of life. A place to go and get away from the noise and bustle of everyday life. A place to take a grandchild on their first hunt. A place to take your gal for a wine and sunset watch. Whatever it is you enjoy, protecting public lands for the good of all is a noble effort, one that requires extreme diligence, and one that will continue to do until the day I die.

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If you have any questions, reach out to me at scottarall@gmail.com.