Arizona Daily Star Editorial: Preserve our public lands
Jun 26, 2025
When word came down about Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s plan, inserted into the Big Beautiful whatever, to mandate the sale of between 0.5% and 0.75% of all Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands in 11 Western states over the next five years, reaction around the region was swift and harsh.
Nowhere, appropriately, were the voices of alarm louder than right here.
Among the many parcels that would have been eligible for sale would have been Forest Service lands in Sabino Canyon and Madera Canyon, and on Mt. Lemmon and Mt. Graham, some of the most beloved acreage under federal control in Southern Arizona.
So the rejoicing was also loud when the Senate parliamentarian last week justifiably declined to include the proposal in the omnibus bill, saying in effect that reconciliation was not the proper forum for a measure that should require committee hearings.
Yet the cheers and sighs of relief are premature.
“We’re just getting started,” Lee said, and sure enough, a revised version of his plan was submitted Wednesday. While it significantly reduced the amount of land eligible for sale, taking all Forest Service lands out of consideration, his plan now focuses on Bureau of Land Management acreage. It would mandate the sale of up to 1.2 million acres over the next five years.
Before examining the potential impact of Lee’s Land Sale Lite, it should be pointed out that selling off the federal lands we all own is a well-established plank of the right-wing Republican platform – and it’s part of a general disdain for, and seeming vendetta against, the concept of public lands.
Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term prepared by the Heritage Foundation, includes a section on the Interior Department written by none other than William Perry Pendley, who ran the Bureau of Land Management without being confirmed for 14 months in the first Trump Administration until a federal judge threw him out of the position.
Pendley has said he believes all public land in the West should be sold to private interests. His Project 2025 plan calls for, among other things, downsizing national monuments – something we also saw in the first Trump term.
Already, this Administration has proposed siphoning $1 billion from national parks, which could effectively shutter up to 350 parks. (And it wants all those “negative” signs accurately describing historical events out of the parks, pronto.)
Doug Burgum, Trump’s new Secretary of the Interior, has referred to public lands as “an incredible asset on America’s balance sheet.” We agree, but for different reasons. Secretary Burgum refers to the lands’ value for grazing and oil and gas development. Senator Lee believes selling public lands can ease America’s housing crisis.
We believe these “assets” are most valuable as whole, undeveloped, wild places that feed America’s soul and provide recreation for all of its citizens, not just the rich ones.
This is not a fringe position.
Indeed, the Republican Party finds itself curiously out of step with the citizens of deep-red states across the West on this issue.
For the past 15 years, Colorado College has polled voters in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
This year’s State of the Rockies Project survey, as always conducted by a bipartisan research team of both Republican and Democratic pollsters, reached some 3,300 voters. The results were in the same vein as those of past years, but even more than ever before, voters across the political spectrum voiced their desire for America to preserve its public lands.
72% of total surveyed voters prioritized protection of water resources, air quality and wildlife habitat on public lands over energy development on those lands.
88% support keeping current national monument designations in place.
65% oppose giving states control of national public lands.
75% oppose cutting funding for national public lands agencies.
Which brings us back to Lee’s revised proposal.
Under his plan, between 615,000 and 1.2 million acres of BLM land would be sold. To be eligible for sale, land would have to be within 5 miles of a “population center.” The land must be used “solely for the development of housing or to address any infrastructure and amenities to support local needs associated with housing.” (Of course, once the land is sold, could the would-be developer possibly sell it again without such restriction? It’s not clear.) Also, the word “affordable” does not precede the word “housing,” and we believe luxury housing and gated golf-course communities are much more likely to spring up across the formerly public landscape than affordable housing.
What is clear is that if public lands are put up for sale, the wealthiest Americans will step in to purchase them — for mining, for private hunting, for McMansions.
One problem that has locked away millions of acres across the West already is that many private holdings effectively block access to public lands. If these “gateway” BLM parcels are sold off, that problem will be multiplied.
BLM lands fulfill another key role in Southern Arizona, bridging between public lands with other designations — national parks, monuments, wildlife preserves — to provide critical wildlife connectivity. Also, land-use issues across the west frequently involve indigenous governments as well as county and city governments.
Jennifer Allen, Pima County Supervisor representing the sprawling District 3, which encompasses much public land, points out correctly that federal land sales, particularly without a careful process and interagency communication, could jeopardize conservation purchases that the county and others have made to preserve open space and wildlife corridors.
Public lands are ours. They belong to all Americans. As Nick Gevock, a Sierra Club staffer in Montana, puts it, “This is the last bit of wealth that the average working-class American has – their public lands – and the billionaires are coming for it.”
Arizona members of Congress, do not let that happen.