Kerby Anderson

If I were to ask you to name a national monument, you would probably pick the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty. President Obama has a different idea. He designated vast acreages in Utah and Nevada as national monuments. The 1906 Antiquities Act gives the president the authority to create national monuments from federal lands.

In recent decades, only a few presidents have used this law. Perhaps the most notable was when President Clinton designated the Grand Staircase-Escalante area as a national monument in Utah. President Obama used the Antiquities Law to lock up 1.35 million acres in Utah and another 300,000 acres in Nevada.

How did the elected representatives of these areas respond? Utah Senator Mike Lee said it was an “arrogant act by a lame duck president [that] will not stand.” He and other Republican leaders said that there had been painstaking negotiations that would have provided a balanced solution. The president’s actions stopped all of that.

Obviously we should be concerned about such a rash act by a lame duck president. But there is another issue that also needs to be discussed. Will the federal government ever stop trying to take over more and more western land? When is enough, really enough?

Mark Stein reminds us that the federal government already owns 80 percent of Nevada. That’s 90,000 square miles and equal to the landmass of the United Kingdom.

Here’s another alarming statistic. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rules over one-eighth of the mass of the United States. That is equal to the acreage of France, Germany, and Italy combined.  If the BLM were a country, it would be the 26th biggest country in the world.

It is time to stop these land grabs and say that the federal government has more than enough land.