BLM wants land renamed 'national public land'
Copyright 2000 Associated Press
December 28, 2000
PORTLAND, Ore. - The federal Bureau of Land Management wants a little name recognition for its work supervising what may be the largest patchwork of public lands in the nation.
Nearly 1,000 current and former BLM managers have asked President Clinton to give the 264 million acres overseen by the agency the same high profile as national forests, national wildlife refuges and national parks, by naming them "national public lands."
"When you walk into a national forest, you know you're there," said William Leavell of Canby, a former BLM director for Oregon and Washington. "Why shouldn't it be the same on BLM lands? They deserve to be recognized, too."
Leavell is vice president of the Public Land Foundation, the group of BLM workers and retirees who this month urged Clinton to formally designate BLM acreage as a "National Public Land System" or another "appropriate name which reflects the importance of these lands to the nation."
Recognizing the BLM as America's "open space agency" would add to the Clinton administration's public land legacy, Leavell said.
The BLM manages leftovers - land unclaimed by homesteaders and unwanted for national parks and forests. But the vast holdings, larger than some countries, have become immensely valuable.
Last year, they generated nearly $2 billion in revenue for federal and state governments through mining royalties, grazing revenue, timber sales, recreation fees and other income.
The revenue gave the BLM the unusual distinction within government of collecting more money than it spends.
BLM land also attracts more than 50 million annual visits to its 205,000 miles of fishable rivers and streams and thousands of miles of trails and byways, according to agency figures.
The Clinton administration and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt have spotlighted some BLM parcels, such as the Cascade-Siskiyou region of southern Oregon, as national monuments.
The remaining wild lands are no less worthy, Leavell and his colleagues maintain.
"We keep saying, 'Hey, you're missing the bigger picture - you're basically cherry-picking the best areas and forgetting everything else,' " said George Lea, president of the Public Lands Foundation, who worked for the BLM in Vale, Lakeview, Burns and Portland before becoming deputy director of the agency in Washington, D.C.
"Put all the public lands into a national lands system, and you're sending the message to the public that they have something of real value there," Lea said.
He would like to see such lands regularly appear, as national parks and forests do now, on popular highway maps and road signs.
Bill Marlett of the Oregon Natural Desert Association said any agency that oversees so much public land deserves public notice. His Bend-based conservation group has considered asking Babbitt to rename the BLM the "U.S. Range Service" or "U.S. Desert and Grasslands Service" to promote its role.
"Image is everything, and we need to get the BLM out of the bottom of the barrel in terms of land agencies," Marlett said.