Federal Land Ideas Gone Bad

Most of the land in Arizona is owned by governments. That is a fact, neither good nor bad by itself.  If citizens are all well served through land ownership by government, then it is good; if we are poorly served, then it is bad.

Are the schools well served by the Land Trust?  Are Native Americans well served by federal ownership of Indian reservations?  Is the public well served by the parks?  Are the birds and plants and animals well served by the refuges?  The answer, supported below, is No!  There are benefits to the way land in Arizona is owned and managed, but the benefits fall far short of what they could and should be. The benefits are declining.  The current and declining status should not be blamed on anyone or group or scapegoat but on fractured ownership and management of the land. The blame resides in the unchangeable past. The credit for achieving better results from land management will belong to citizens who do our part to solve problems, align missions with results, and keep an eye on management so we know how well beneficial results are actually achieved.  Or so I will argue in what follows.

Land Trust

According to  https://land.az.gov/about

“Arizona has approximately 9.28 million surface acres and 9 million subsurface acres of Trust lands. Scattered throughout the State, the Trust lands are extremely diverse in character, ranging from Sonoran desert lands, desert grasslands, and riparian areas in the southern half of the state, to the mountains, forests and Colorado Plateau regions of northern Arizona. The majority of the Trust lands are located in rural areas of the State with more than one million acres located within or adjacent to urbanized areas. The Trust lands constitute approximately 13% of land ownership in Arizona.

State Trust lands are    …    not public lands, but are instead the subject of a public Trust created to support the education of our children. The Trust accomplishes this mission in a number of ways, including, through its sale and lease of Trust lands for grazing, agriculture, municipal, school site, residential, commercial and open space purposes. In both rural and urban contexts, Trust lands also provide the substantial added benefit of creating critical local economic stimulation.”

The actual holdings are shown in Land Trust annual reports and in blue on this interactive map:

http://gis.azland.gov/webapps/parcel/?loc=-111.8170,35.2216,12&layers=3,1,0

Land trust land is checkerboarded in square mile parcels through much of AZ but also occurs in larger, connected units.  Most of it, 8.4 million acres, is leased for grazing and agricultural use.  A very small amount is sold at auction each year.  Revenue is kept in a permanent fund or distributed to schools. Schools received about 135 million dollars in 2015.  Impressive!  What did the schools do with the money?  No one knows.  Some of it must have trickled down to classrooms, right? https://land.az.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/2015_Annual_Report_Final_022416.pdf

The Land Trust annual reports are exemplary in that they contain a great deal of factual information about the history and status of almost everything a citizen might want to know about Land Trust management.  What is absent from the annual reports is any information about what all the schools and other entities receiving the money do with it.  Maybe Lands Commissioner Lisa Atkins, appointed in June 2015, will find a way to add such information in the future.  I haven’t called to ask.  My bad.

Indian Reservations

About 21 million acres in Arizona are in Indian Reservations, shown in big orange areas of the interactive land map (URL above.)

Reservation land is not governed by the State of Arizona but is part of the over 55 million acres managed by BIA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  BIA history includes, I’m sure, many instances of good management.  (Disclosure: a family friend headed the BIA during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.)  But BIA history includes occupations of BIA facilities by Native Americans, shootings, class action lawsuits, and healthcare scandals that have hit the news.  (The government won the shootouts and lost billions of dollars in the lawsuits. Some of the dollars escaped the pockets of attorneys and reached the reservations.  Healthcare has been transferred to Health and Human Services.)

Arizona citizens can move freely onto and off of most of the Reservation land in Arizona. Some of the land, such as the White Mountain Apache Reservation, is quite beautiful. However, the first time I saw the Navajo reservation I wondered how the Feds could have found a worse place in the USA to make into a reservation. That is a totally untutored feeling; there are huge deposits of valuable minerals under the land, not accessible to or benefitting citizens of Arizona, including Native Americans. The lengthy quotation below captures much of what we should know about the management of Indian lands:

“Crossing into most Native American reservations reveals islands of poverty in a sea of prosperity. Per capita incomes on Indian lands are nearly a third of those for all U.S. citizens. Unemployment rates are no better, reaching almost four times higher than the national average.

The difference is due to a lack of property rights on reservations. Unlike other American citizens, Native Americans on reservations cannot even own land.  The title to most reservation land is held in trust by the federal government. This means Native Americans cannot manage their own resources or use their land as collateral for loans. The result is what Peruvian economist Hernado de Soto calls “dead capital.”

The amount of dead capital on reservations is enormous. Reservations contain almost 30% of the coal reserves west of the Mississippi, 50% of potential uranium reserves, and 20% of known oil and gas reserves. The Council of Energy Resource Tribes recently estimated the total value of these resources at nearly $1.5 trillion.”

http://www.perc.org/articles/unlocking-wealth-indian-nations

Hernando de Soto’s term, dead capital, connotes much about land in Arizona, even land not on reservations.  Somebody oughta do something …

BLM Land

According to http://www.blm.gov/az/st/en/info/about.html

“BLM Arizona administers 12.2 million surface acres of public lands, along with another 17.5 million subsurface acres within the state. Field Offices throughout the state provide on-the-ground field management: Arizona Strip, Hassayampa, Kingman, Lake Havasu, Lower Sonoran, Safford, Tucson and Yuma. Arizona BLM management, coordination and direction come from the Arizona State Office, which is guided by State Director Ray Suazo.

The Challenge

The American West is rapidly changing. An increase in urban population is placing new demands on our natural resources. Nowhere is this better understood than in Arizona, where Phoenix has become one of the nation’s fastest growing cities. These demands, combined with a growing public concern over the health of the environment, challenge Arizona BLM.”

Please note that the BLM manages more Arizona land than does the Land Trust.  It includes grazing lands and much more: National Monuments, Wilderness Areas, National Conservation Areas, Historic and Scenic Trails such as the Old Spanish Trail and the Wilderness Trail.  Is the BLM rising to the challenge the web site describes above?  That is a question for all citizens to ask politely, persistently, and repeatedly.

National Parks

The interactive map (URL above) shows lots of green (national forests,) some grey (wildlife refuges,) and  other colors (national or state parks and such.)  I’ve lumped these all together in this article because much of it is public land not managed by the State. The most famous National Park in AZ is the Grand Canyon National Park but the Petrified Forest National Park and the two Suguaro National Parks are well known.  In addition, we have several National Monuments: Vermillion Cliffs, Wupatki, Sunset Crater, Montezuma’s Castle, Walnut Canyon, and Canyon de Chelly.  Also famous is the Monument Valley Tribal Park.

There are two important things to say about the National Parks in Arizona: First, they add value to the people of the State and the nation. Second, maintaining them costs a lot.

The National Park income lags behind expenses.  That is OK if you believe that the 50% of US citizens who pay all the federal taxes are also the major beneficiaries of the Park system and quite happy and willing to subsidize the other half of US citizens, plus foreign visitors and persons who visit without documents.  Taxpayer willingness is no doubt a function of costs and whether the Parks and park fees are managed well.  Holly Fretwell and her colleagues at the Property and Environmental Research Center provide relevant information in an article on Breaking the Deferred Maintenance Backlog. http://www.perc.org/articles/BreakingtheBacklog

The National Park system as a whole takes in less money each year than would be required to maintain the parks in their current state.  More maintenance is deferred each year, assuring that the Deferred Maintenance Backlog grows.  The growing backlog is nearly 12 billion dollars!

Fretwell and colleagues offer 7 sensible suggestions for cutting into the backlog.  Each suggestion is detailed in a separate article.  One suggestion resonates with me: the feds could stop putting line items in the budget to spend taxpayer money to acquire new park land.  They could use that money—if it actually is appropriated—for maintenance until they can maintain what they already own. Another suggestion: make operational decisions as close to the action as possible.  Many decisions that could be made at the local level by park managers are made somewhere else, up the hierarchy of authority well into the clouds of confusion and conflicting agendas.

Conclusions

What do I conclude from all the above?

Decisions regarding effective land use and preservation in Arizona are made from afar and without the information necessary to make intelligent decisions. 

For example, it is very likely that park managers could make better decisions about our National Parks than can bureaucrats whose careers are dependent on playing nicely with other bureaucrats. Another example: my car works better when important activities are managed with proper operational data; such management is done by several little computers near the action, not by a bigger more powerful computer farther away: distributed control is superior to central control.  Always in technology.  Always in history.  Always in management.  (Always?  Always when we have data to know results; I can’t say in areas where we simply do not have the data to tell us what works.)

The distributed control concept explains why our modern military and our most effective large corporations and small businesses push so much operational decision making down to where the action is, reserving strategic decisions for the higher ups.  The distributed control idea would be a good guideline for any kind of management anywhere.

Government officials must make stupid decisions if they lack the information necessary to make intelligent decisions.  If personal stupidity is a factor at all it would be because some keep trying to do the impossible, keep falling short, and are too stupid or crooked to care.  If we voters throw the stupid politicians out without fixing the information flow we’ll simply elect other politicians who act stupidly through no fault of their own.  Throwing out any crooked politicians in Arizona would help and be satisfying but the real problems would still not get solved.

Citizens can find BLM’s mission and the Land Trust’s mission and the National Park Mission and the missions of other agencies on public websites.  But we cannot find, on any of the websites, a good set of measures or indicators or even anecdotes that would tell citizens and officials how well the mission is fulfilled.  How well was it fulfilled last year?  What clues or indicators tell us why it is likely to do better—or worse–next year?

Land Trust’s website is better than most in that it tells us how revenue is generated from the land held in trust.  It tells who got how much money.  It does not tell us if the schools and other recipients of the funds use them well.  And that is what would tell citizens whether Land Trust is generating revenue that adds value. To the extent that recipients fiddle funds away the Land Trust is funding incompetence.

Of course, Land Trust officials cannot dictate how schools, let us say, use the funds and whether that use adds educational value.  Nor should they. But from the taxpayer perspective it would be worth knowing whether the funds are fiddled away or used in ways that demonstrably benefit Arizona students.  We might even protect the Land Trust Commissioner’s back if she required recipients to report on the benefits attained through use of the funds. She could probably do that as a condition for supplying more funds.  If she did that, there would be anguished screams by bureaucrats from Wilcox to Yuma and from Nogales to Page but maybe a few people in the state legislature would take the trouble to understand the school funding formula and   …   but I dream.

 

About Dale Brethower 12 Articles
Dale Brethower is a Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Western Michigan University. He currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.