Near the end of a long dirt road outside the small city of Casper, Carolyn Griffith’s tan A-frame house sits in front of a towering mountainous ridge.
“This is the foothills of Casper Mountain,” said Griffith, who has short, spunky, white hair.
As chickadees sang in her front yard, the 65-year-old said the wide open area is pretty tranquil, but that was all turned upside down on one February afternoon last year.
“I noticed a backhoe going onto the state land,” Griffith recalled.
Right now, that land is open for recreation, but it’s in a state trust. Griffith and her neighbors learned gravel and sand mining had been approved there.
“The individual that was in the backhoe produced a permit for a potential gravel pit,” she said. “So we were all pretty shocked at that.”
She's worried that gravel mining could impact the fragile aquifer she relies on for drinking. Others are worried about losing their place to birdwatch or walk their dogs — things that don’t exactly make the state money.
“State trust land is not public land. It's trust land,” said Jason Crowder, who used to run the Office of State Lands and Investments, which manages the land.
At a highly-attended “emerging issue forum” at the University of Wyoming, Crowder explained that trust land has to be used largely to fund K-12 education, as well as other public institutions, like the University of Wyoming.
“Office of State Lands and investments is not the BLM. It's not the Forest Service,” he said. “We have different missions.”
Federal lands are managed for multiple uses, but on many state lands in Wyoming and the Mountain West, recreation comes second. Some states allow day use like picnicking or fishing and sometimes camping, but overnight stays are off the table in Wyoming.
“We're here to optimize revenues,” Crowder emphasized
But there’s simmering tensions over how these lands are used. Outside Casper, hundreds of Wyomingites have fought wind farms or glamping operations on other parcels of state trust land.
“What's lost in that criticism is that the office has a fiduciary duty,” said Crowder, “a duty higher than all others.”
That's a big reason why many Wyomingites are worried about proposals in Congress to transfer federal land over to states, local governments or private owners.
Some conservatives want the state to take over all 30 million acres of federal public land in Wyoming — about nine times more than the state currently manages. Many are frustrated with federal management of mineral leases or ATV restrictions on roads, and think the state would do a better job.
Some even believe Congress is constitutionally obligated to dispose of its land. A controversial, largely symbolic resolution narrowly failed in the state senate earlier this year that would have demanded Congress hand over most of those acres in Wyoming, but many thought it went too far.
State Sen. Bill Landen (R-Casper) has said the state could take on management parcel by parcel.
“For a long time we have talked about land transfer, and It just feels like to me there's an opportunity at the national level right now,” Landen said in a legislative meeting recently.
But if federal lands are turned over to states, there’s no guarantee that land would stay public. Wyoming has sold about 20% of its state land in the past two centuries, looking just at land on the surface, not underneath where there’s mineral rights. Utah has sold about 50%, and Nevada has gotten rid of nearly all of its state owned land.
| Credit: State governments, Wilderness Society, National Association of State Trust Lands |
States might also not have the capacity to take on more land. The Wyoming state trust agency has five field staff for 3.4 million surface acres, according to Crowder. The state parks department, the other state land manager, has a shrinking budget. The director has said it has fewer resources than it did 15 years ago,
That’s also why environmentalists say land management should be left as it is.
“We understand there are issues with how federal agencies are managed, but our federal agencies have more capacity to do public outreach,” said Josh Metten, the Wyoming field manager at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a hunting and angling group.
State lawmakers actually sought a study on this in 2015. They wanted to inherit federal lands but learned there was no way Wyoming could afford taking over management with the system currently in place.
Utah, which sued the federal government to take over some land, has created an office to take over management. That hasn’t happened in Wyoming. Some lawmakers say they want to create a new state public land category.
“There is no clear way to take federal public land and just transition it into state public land,” Metten concluded.
In the foothills of Casper Mountain, Griffith gestured to the open landscape through her floor-to-ceiling window.
“We knew there were state lands,” she said. “We also knew there was a fragile water supply and certainly didn't think that digging a pit through that would be a good choice for the land.”
After a year of pushback, the gravel mine project ended up largely hitting the brakes. The state's top officials didn't renew most of the leases, but Griffith knows — with state management — there could be another threat down that long dirt road.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise StateCRED Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
