Apparently running short of local issues in this Grinchtide season, the exalted New York Times on Sunday turned its editorial attention to the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act.<\/p>\n
As cornucopias go, it is hard to top what has been happening in Nevada,\u201d wrote the Timesmen, as Christmas carols and popcorn-sated pigeons wafted up toward their gray-tower windows from Times Square, far below.<\/p>\n
Local governments have been cashing in on the sale of federal lands to spare their taxpayers the tab for a raft of amenities that include parks and shooting ranges,\u201d The Times continued. \u201cThat\u2019s right: the federal government has auctioned off thousands of acres in the last decade under an unusual law that channels most of the proceeds into an account set aside for projects in Nevada… The obvious question is why federal lands should be tapped like some desert ATM, forcing taxpayers in the 49 other states to subsidize the booming regional growth around Las Vegas,\u201d the Timesmen note.<\/p>\n
One of the main rationales for the program was to acquire and protect environmentally sensitive tracts of land in private hands, but only 15 cents of every dollar has gone toward such projects. … The big losers are taxpayers everywhere else, few of whom even know about this one-state bonanza. … Nevadans have every right to have boccie and tennis courts. But it is not clear why the federal government should sell off chunks of the nation to pay for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
ell, we should have known someone was going to call us on the \u201cboccie\u201d thing, eventually.
\nManhattan Island \u2014 and Queens, for that matter, not to mention some equally pricey tracts in Port Chester and Southampton \u2014 are also \u201cchunks of the nation.\u201d As New Yorkers stand shivering in their rags this holiday season, pleading for federal aid to help rebuild their decaying infrastructure, why doesn\u2019t the federal government just sell off some of those \u201cchunks of the nation\u201d \u2014 which would surely generate higher revenues than a couple thousand acres of our own god-forsaken lizard habitat?<\/p>\n
Oh, wait. The federal government doesn\u2019t OWN any of that land \u2014 except for the occasional dockyard, arsenal, and post office building, as authorized in the Constitution \u2014 does it? In fact, New Yorkers have been free to enrich themselves by buying and selling and using those lands for profitable purposes for CENTURIES, haven\u2019t they?<\/p>\n
Where in the Constitution does it say the federal government \u2014 let alone these struggling paupers of New York City \u2014 are authorized to own, manage and control 90 percent of any Western state, and to expect a share of the profits when the federals finally, reluctantly, deign to \u201csell\u201d these lands (on which they have never paid any taxes, which they never \u201cpurchased by the consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be,\u201d as called for in Article I, Section 8 of that aforementioned Constitution) to the very people who live here?<\/p>\n
Let us imagine for a moment that Manhattan had attempted to grow from the quaint seaport surrounded by woods, farms and cesspits to which George Washington returned in 1783, into today\u2019s metropolis, under the conditions currently facing Nevadans.<\/p>\n
Let us imagine 90 percent of Manhattan island were today owned by the federal government, that New Yorkers could use the bulk of that land only under leases whose conditions could be changed at whim by the federals \u2014 who were even now busy dumping boulders and chaining gates to shut down public access to Morningside Heights and the Upper East Side \u2014 that even the most minor attempt to lay a corrugated steel pipe under a dirt road up near 5th Avenue at 51st Street currently had to be delayed until the federals got around to sending out inspectors to certify there was no \u201cdanger to riparian habitat,\u201d no \u201cthreat to endangered species,\u201d no relevant \u201carchaeological sites\u201d (which could be as minor as a rough circle of blackened rocks identified as a \u201cprehistoric fire pit.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Build high-rise buildings north of 23rd Street? Hold on just a minute there, bub. A certain percentage of that land must be left available for recreational uses; a percentage of any homes built there must be sold to poor people of our choosing at below-market rates. …
\nAnd you didn\u2019t think to bring up the presence of the endangered window-ledge-loving rock dove, did you? Do you have a sanctuary and recovery program in place? Who\u2019s your environmental advisor, for heaven\u2019s sake, John D. Rockefeller?<\/p>\n
In fact, the Western states\u2019 congressional delegations should remove such concerns from the realm of the merely hypothetical. Enact into federal statute the New England Seacoast Cranberry Bog Restoration Act \u2014 with full powers to seize property and remediate past illicit and unpermitted \u201cdrainage\u201d enterprises \u2014 along with programs to reintroduce breeding populations of the gray wolf and the mountain lion to New York\u2019s Central park \u2014 and see how long it takes the folks in Times Square to change their tune about wise and beneficent federal \u201cland and species management.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Apparently running short of local issues in this Grinchtide season, the exalted New York Times on Sunday turned its editorial attention to the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act. As cornucopias go, it is hard to top what has been happening in Nevada,\u201d wrote the Timesmen, as Christmas carols and popcorn-sated pigeons wafted up toward […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public-land"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-h","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}