'Buy One, Sell One' Measure to Limit Federal Lands Introduced
Over the past few weeks, there have been a number of plans proposed to expand the amount of California land that the federal government has control over. (One of which is basically a formality, and the other which needs to go through rigorous debate.) But if Rep. Howard Morgan Griffith (R-VA) has his way, those expansion efforts may soon come to a halt.
This week, Griffith introduced a measure into the House Subcommittee on Conservation and Forestry. The goal is to limit the amount of land that the federal government controls by forcing land management agencies to sell an acre of federally-controlled land every time a new acre is purchased. (Profits from the sales would head into the U.S. Treasury to pay off the public debt.) For policy wonks, here's how the main part of the measure reads:
(a) In General. -- For acquisition of land by the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture that would result in a net increase of total land acreage under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, or the Forest Service, the Secretary concerned shall offer for sale an equal number of acres of Federal land that is under the same jurisdictional status.
This is followed by a few exemptions to the measure (essentially, the "buy one acre, sell one acre" plan happens unless the Secretary of the Interior or Secretary of Agriculture need extra land), but if passed, it would dramatically change the process by which land becomes National Parks and Monuments. As such, we'll be following any movement with the measure.
