Thursday, July 27, 2000 | 10:02 a.m.
The Seattle-based Western Land Exchange Project, an environmental organization that tracks federal land swaps throughout the West, sent a letter to presidential candidates today asking them to reform the entire process.
More than 115 groups from Virginia to Nevada signed the letter to the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Al Gore, the GOP front-runner, George W. Bush, and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.
The letter asks the candidates to pledge a veto of any land-trade legislation until a full congressional investigation of such land deals is completed.
The project's letter is responding to a General Accounting Office audit last week on U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management exchanges that criticized the land deals. The GAO concluded the federal land swaps were damaging to the public's interest and to taxpayers.
The GAO report capped 10 audits released in the last four years by the inspectors general of the Interior Department and the Department of Agriculture, which found serious flaws in land exchanges, including those in Nevada.
The presidential candidates need to restore the Land and Water Conservation Fund, placed in the general fund during the Reagan administration to offset federal budget debts, Janine Blaelock, founder of the Western Land Exchange Project, said.
The GAO's report, requested by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., went a step further and said the process was so flawed that Congress should ban further swaps.
Sens. Richard Bryan and Harry Reid, both D-Nev., pushed the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act of 1998 to buy environmentally sensitive private lands outright from auctions of BLM parcels landlocked in the urban Las Vegas Valley.
But the two federal auctions in Las Vegas have produced some disappointing results, according to local BLM officials. An estimated $33 million has been raised, but only 35 parcels out of a total of 87 BLM blocks attracted buyers in June.
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