Last Friday at a town hall meeting held by State Representative Wayne Krieger and State Senator Jeff Kruse, the former informed the audience that since 2001 the federal government has acquired 2 million acres of private land. If true, this would be a combined area equal to twice the size of Coos County but when I asked Krieger for a source to validate the numbers he didn’t have an answer so I contacted the Portland area BLM office and asked for a breakdown of property acquisitions since 2001. This morning I received this reply from a Land Law Examiner and the results may take a couple of weeks – “We have a host of different land tenure actions that can result in lands being acquired; acquisition, land exchange, donation, administrative jurisdictional realignment and Congressional withdrawal, which transfers lands from one federal agency to another. I am fairly new in this position which unfortunately does not afford me with the personal historical knowledge of the various land tenure actions since 2001 for lands administrated by the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon, however I am positive that we have retained records of those actions.”
The BLM is just one agency and I have sent similar inquiries to see where I can obtain a certifiable accounting of federal land changes. Meanwhile read this account of a complicated land swap between the federal government and one of the Koch brothers. Land Swap Triggers Colorado Dust-Up
UPDATE A report by the Congressional Research Center, ‘Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data‘ states, “The federal government owns roughly 635-640 million acres, 28% of the 2.27 billion acres of land in the United States. Four agencies administer 609 million acres of this land: the Forest Service (USFS) in the Department of Agriculture, and the National Park Service (NPS), Bureau
of Land Management (BLM), and Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), all in the Department of the Interior (DOI). Most of these lands are in the West and Alaska. In addition, the Department of Defense administers 19 million acres in military bases, training ranges, and more. Numerous other agencies administer the remaining federal acreage. ” From 1990 to 2010 the federal government has lost 2.8% control nationwide.
According to the report from 1990 to 2010 Oregon transferred 603,427 acres or 1.9% to either the US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Parks, Fish and Wildlife or the Department of Defense. Unless there has been a transfer of lands equivalent to the area of Coos County and half of Curry County in the last three years, Krieger’s allegation is false.
