Source: Los Angeles Times
County commissioners in the rural American West possess the daunting authority of Afghan warlords, it’s been said. They wield their power by demanding federal agencies do their bidding in the vast expanse of public lands in which the counties are embedded. Too often, they have their way.
Last week, the Trump administration announced a plan to move the Bureau of Land Management’s top officials out of Washington and into regional western offices. The scheme will only exaggerate the influence of county commissioners, to the detriment of most Americans.
Western counties are enormous. Utah’s largest county, San Juan, at nearly 8,000 square miles, is larger than Connecticut and almost as big as New Jersey. Like many counties in the rural West, San Juan is too dry and too remote for dense settlement; fewer than two people per square mile live there.
Under the Trump administration, local officials in dozens of such unpopulated counties have been flexing their muscles, especially in Utah. Read the rest of this article HERE.
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Categories: Horse News
Tagged as: BLM, Bureau of Land Management, County commissioners, Department of the Interior, influence, Public Lands, San Juan County Commissioner Bruce Adams, Utah
Straight from the Horse's Heart 
VIDEO/
Paragon of corruption at Trump Interior draws eye of Congress
Secretary David Bernhardt became involved in a land deal by a wealthy Republican Trump donor,
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/paragon-of-corruption-at-trump-interior-draws-eye-of-congress-64120901532
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What is happening to our “voice” as Americans when we try and try to speak the truth and are ignored?
This is frightening.
“The Utah congressional delegation and the governor amplified their voices, and helped the president ignore nearly 3 million comments from citizens across the country who urged that the monuments remain intact.”
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Our voices are our votes — Utah’s governor was elected as were their congressional representatives, as are all of ours. The more of us who remain complacent and unconcerned, the more we all lose to those who profit by our losses. Comments are mostly ignored or tossed out as private agendas reign ever more supreme. As I see it, the only solution lies in the power of the people (325 million of us) to make our voices heard and hold our elected officials effectively to account, despite their efforts to neuter us (and our wild horses!).
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Grand Junction has been chumped, looks like maybe 27 new jobs (probably less than any McDonald’s).
“As with so many other Trump-era conflicts, when it comes to public-lands policy, the stakes have been raised, the boundaries pushed, the norms eroded. Longtime GOP operatives at the Interior Department are hard at work radically reshaping the way that the federal government manages much of the West, particularly with an eye toward “energy dominance,” the administration’s preferred name for its fire sale of millions of acres of land for new oil and gas development. Activists worry that Interior’s actions could have a devastating impact on the environment, wildlife protections and efforts to stop climate change — and that the consequences will be felt for decades to come.
“The ‘energy dominance’ agenda, the regulatory rollbacks, the administrative rollbacks, the expansion of leasing, even the relocation of BLM’s headquarters — they’re all attempts to buttress oil and gas,” says Taylor McKinnon, a public-lands campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity. “A lot of what [Bernhardt] is doing are legacy moves to secure the future of oil and gas on public lands, insofar as he’s able to.”
https://www.westword.com/news/david-bernhardt-brings-the-forty-year-war-on-public-lands-to-a-head-11419545
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It’s not a done deal:
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/458352-congress-pumps-brakes-on-interior-push-to-move-bureau-of-land
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