The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently released its plan for managing millions of acres of public lands near Rock Springs.
Many state leaders aren't satisfied with the agency’s chosen Rock Springs Resource Management Plan (RMP) and Final Environmental Impact Statement, but at least one lawmaker says that as-is, it does allow the Kelly Parcel deal to move forward.
In the last legislative session, lawmakers detailed a plan to sell the 640-acre Kelly Parcel to Grand Teton National Park for $100 million.
The parcel is surrounded by sawtooth mountain ranges and speckled by sagebrush and wildflowers. Its unique geography forms a bottleneck that conservation groups say is critical for the migration paths of wildlife like pronghorn, mule deer and moose.
One stipulation was that the BLM needed to back off from selecting its preferred, conservation-oriented RMP for 3.6 million acres of public land adjacent to the city of Rock Springs.
“One of our challenges here in dealing with the federal government is that we feel somewhat helpless, because the federal government owns 77 percent of the land in Sweetwater County, and for the most part, can do with it what it wants,” said Rep. Clark Stith (R-Rock Springs). “I tried through the budget amendment dealing with the Kelly Parcel for us to try to get some leverage over the BLM. I was pleased that the BLM backed off of its most radical solution and paved the way, potentially, for the sale of the Kelly Parcel.”
The BLM’s previous proposal would have put about 61 percent of the area under the Rock Springs RMP off limits for oil and gas development.
The agency now plans for 30 percent of the area to be closed to oil and gas development. That’s up from the 15 percent of the area currently barred.
After a protest period ends on Sept. 23, Gov. Mark Gordon will need to review the BLM’s decision, and then the deal will go before the State Board of Land Commissioners for a final vote.
A competing deal framework being explored by some on the five-member board would merge the parcel with the park in exchange for land swaps in the Powder River Basin and elsewhere that have oil and gas resources, owned by the feds.
But Stith says though he would prefer that option, it would likely need an act of U.S. Congress to proceed, in part because of the bureaucratic loopholes involved.
“The big picture … is that that kind of land swap simply is not going to happen if it's left up to the federal agencies,” Stith said, “because you have different competing federal agencies [the BLM and U.S. Forest Service] who are unlikely to cooperate with each other.”
Sith added that as far as he knows, in terms of interactions between states and the feds, that particular version of the Kelly Parcel deal has little-to-no precedent. That’s because it would consist of one federal agency losing control of land in exchange for another agency gaining control of a different parcel of land.
Board member and Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder previously told Wyoming Public Radio in an interview that she would vote no on the cash-for-land version of the Kelly Parcel deal if it ever made its way before the board – even if that means the federal government gives up on the exchange.
Degenfelder said she believes that that version of the sale is too generous to the feds.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
