There are a few regional tropes that are effective at triggering emotional responses from Westerners. Water rights is perhaps top among them, but wildfire is closing in fast as the issue that garners attention from residents and lawmakers alike. Public land management has, for many decades, been an outlier in the western cultural lexicon that is rising again to prominence in policy and political debate as descendants of the Sagebrush Rebellion seek to assert states’ rights over federal lands within their borders.
The sentiment has appeared again in pending Colorado legislation: Senate Bill 160, which purports to clarify that the state and its communities can exercise police power on federal lands during times of emergency – namely wildfires – goes much further in its assumptions. The Legislature should reject the measure.
SB 160’s premise is to clarify “that the state possesses, on its own behalf and on behalf of its political subdivisions, the jurisdictional right to respond to and take action on land owned and managed within the state by the BLM or the U.S. Forest Service lands for which the federal government claims only a proprietorial interest when conditions on such lands adversely affect, or pose a clear and imminent danger to, life and the public health and safety of the residents of the state ...” However, the nine-page bill spends considerable ink arguing that the federal government lacks much authority at all in such instances, and when it does, exercises it improperly – to the state’s detriment and that of its residents. The measure expresses downright exasperation over the matter: “The jurisdictional right of the state and its political subdivisions to mitigate potential risks to life and to the public health and safety should not be fettered by an intrusive and uncooperative federal bureaucracy.”
That is hardly the simple clarification the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Ken Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, claims it to be – in the name of expediency in addressing wildfires.
Rather, it is a direct jab at what some in Colorado see as inept or inadequate land management practices by the BLM or Forest Service. The measure, which Senate will debate today, deserves to go no further.
