Utah may have fired the first shot, but Idaho and Wyoming are also rallying to defend the right of western states to have more control over unappropriated federal lands within their borders. These states, along with Alaska and Arizona, have joined together in an amicus to encourage the U.S. Supreme Court to review this important case.
From the joint state amicus:
“These unappropriated lands are managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and encompass a significant portion of Amici’s landmass. The BLM manages 28% of the land within Wyoming’s boundaries, 22% of the land in Idaho, 17% of the land in Arizona, and 16% of the land in Alaska. And while not all lands managed by the BLM are unappropriated lands, the vast majority are. In Idaho, for example, roughly 80% of BLM lands (17% of all land in Idaho, more than 9 million acres) are not reserved for any designated purpose.
Amici agree with Utah’s legal analysis of the constitutional questions governing these lands. Rather than repeating Utah’s analysis, Amici submit this brief to explain the tangible harms that federal ownership of unappropriated lands uniquely imposes on western States on a daily basis. In short, western States’ sovereign authority to address issues of local concern is curtailed, and billions of dollars are diverted away from western States.
Amici are no less sovereign in law than the older 38 States without substantial federal lands, but—lacking control of much of their territory—they are effectively less sovereign in fact. Granting the relief Utah requests would begin to level the playing field for all western States, and restore the proper balance of federalism between western States and the federal government.”
Among the examples of harms listed in the amicus is the current controversy in Idaho concerning Lava Ridge and windmills:
“Encroachment on State sovereign authority is not merely hypothetical, nor are its consequences imagined. Clashes between State and federal authorities rear their heads every day in western States. Consider a few examples.
The BLM is nearing final approval of the Lava Ridge wind farm project to build hundreds of 660-foot wind turbines, each twice as tall as the State’s highest building, on unappropriated federal land in south-central Idaho. The turbines will generate electricity primarily for California, and their operators will pay land-use fees to the federal government—but Idaho will bear the costs: the eyesores towering over local historic sites, the damaged roads, the reduction of water supply available to ranchers, and an effective no-fly zone for the crop-dusters that local agriculture depends on.
Unsurprisingly, Idahoans vehemently oppose the project, including through a resolution passed by the Idaho Legislature and a bill proposed by Idaho’s entire Congressional delegation. But the BLM doesn’t have to care; the citizens of Idaho have exactly as much power over this project as the citizens of Illinois or New Jersey—or perhaps less, since there are fewer of them.
This is precisely the sort of local decision that Idaho should have the sovereign authority to address. If any other landowner proposed a 100,000-acre farm of titanic windmills, it would need the State’s approval—it would need to lobby, to adjust the project to reduce local impacts and find ways to compensate its neighbors and Idahoans generally for what it was doing to their State. But because the landowner happens to be the federal government, acting not as a sovereign exercising enumerated powers but merely as proprietor, Idaho is powerless. It has no sticks and gets no carrots.”
The amicus brief concludes:
“That’s why this Court’s intervention is necessary. Granting the relief requested in Utah’s bill of complaint would make clear that western States are not second-class sovereigns. They have not ceded power to the federal government to own and regulate their territory in perpetuity, and they have the same right as other States to manage land within their boundary that the federal government is not using for enumerated purposes.”
Should the U.S. Supreme Court decide to hear this case it could have profound implications for all western states and their ability to better manage what occurs within their borders.