What's at stake?
Environmentalists have been trying to improve protections in the San Joaquin River Gorge, owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management, for over a decade.
Much of the prized public land in the Sierras above Fresno that was at risk of getting sold off to real estate developers as part of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” such as Huntington Lake and Edison Lake, was taken off the bargaining table Monday afternoon after senate officials ruled that selling these key parcels owned by the National Forest Service could not be voted on in its current state due to procedural issues.
But one of Fresno’s top hiking spots, with cultural significance to local tribes – the San Joaquin River Gorge – could still be at risk of getting auctioned off.
It is expected that the final decision will be made before the 4th of July.
“The leadership has signaled to the administration that they want this done before the 4th of July recess,” said Katie Hawkins, California Program Director of Outdoor Alliance, a coalition of groups representing outdoor enthusiasts.
The new proposal from Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, would still allow public land to be sold to developers to create more housing, but only land held by the Bureau of Land Management within five miles of a population center.
The Senate parliamentarian ruled that Lee couldn’t sell off the national forest land, the Associate Press reported, due to restrictions in the budget reconciliation process. Lee acknowledged Tuesday that these same rules could hamper his new proposal, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Much of the land in the river gorge hiking trails is held by the Bureau of Land Management. It’s unclear if the gorge is excluded in Lee’s latest proposal he announced Monday afternoon on X, as it is within a few miles of Auberry, a town of about 3,000 people.
In 2014, a few mile-long section of the San Joaquin River Gorge was recommended for special protections by the Bureau of Land Management as a National Wild and Scenic River. That designation – which could protect the land from inundation and destruction from the proposed Temperance Flat Dam – was never finalized.
A version of Lee’s proposal excluded lands under National Wild and Scenic River protections – among other designations – from being sold off.
A map of the lands near Fresno that were proposed to be sold can be viewed here. Outdoor Alliance will be preparing a new map of lands still eligible for sale in the coming days.
The original June 14 proposal, coming from Lee, the senior senator from Utah, sent shock waves to every corner of the American West.
Lee wanted to put up roughly 250 million acres of public land currently managed by the National Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management for sale – some held in the public hand since the 1890s.
The last big attempt to privatize vast parts of the West failed at the hands of former President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, but Lee mobilized similar talking points a few weeks ago to put up an area roughly five times the size of Kansas for sale.
Lee hoped that selling the land would be popular, claiming that opening up prime national areas to real estate developers would help solve the housing crisis and help pay the government’s bills in Washington.
Lee told the New York Times that turning over the land to the private sector would turn “federal liabilities into taxpayer value, while making housing more affordable for hardworking American families.”
But after Outdoor Alliance analyzed Lee’s proposal, they mapped what was truly at stake. It was a heist of public resources in epic proportions, Hawkins said.
“This is the largest public land grab in our country’s history,” she said about Lee’s original proposal. “People, when they look at this map, they go and say ‘That’s the camping spot my grandfather took me to 30 years ago.’”
Some of America’s prized wilderness, Outdoor Alliance found, was up for sale: the forests around Yosemite Valley and the meadows next to Wyoming’s Teton National Park, for example.
Even with the housing crisis, it is unclear why Lee decided to take on some of the West’s greatest heirlooms and pawn them off to corporations and developers.
An analysis by Headwaters Economics found much of the land was too poorly resourced with infrastructure to be feasible for housing. The rest was laid in with immense wildfire risk.
Others feared that, at best, the sell-off would afford the mega-rich with additional vacation homes – a new Aspen or Jackson Hole, maybe. Revenue projections claimed by Lee from selling that land, the last claimed benefit, left a poor taste in the mouths of many – ranging from the typical environmental groups to ranchers and hunters as well.
“For it to be used as a budgetary item: it’s un-American,” said Hawkins.
Even more inexplicable is the politics of the land grab. About a month ago, said Hawkins, who has been tracking the horse trading in DC closely, an attempt at the House of Representatives to sell off 500,000 acres of public land held in Utah and Nevada failed after rural Congressional backlash.
“Because of that pressure, it was taken out,” Hawkins said about the bill. “There was a bipartisan opposition happening in Congress on the House side.”
With the House version failed, Lee took the baton and doubled down on the proposal, making it 25 times larger. His mega-plan appears to have met a similar fate to Reagan’s in the early 1980s.
In February of 1982, Reagan tried to sell 4.4 million acres of public land, said Zephaniah Fleetwood, a UC Davis PhD student who is studying the issue.
Fresh off the campaign trail in 1980, Reagan had branded himself to voters as a “Sagebrush Rebel,” a moniker for a New Right movement which sought to transfer all federal land to individual states. Early in his administration, Reagan’s top official, Department of Interior chief James Watt, smoothed things over with the “Rebels,” said Fleetwood, devising a “Good Neighbor” policy which gave the rebels the same “insider access” as the environmentalists that had been empowered by President Richard Nixon in the 1970s.
With that political thorn already solved, the Reagan administration’s plan to sell public land was a plan looking for a cause. It ended up sticking out like a sore thumb for politicians across the West.
Congressional leaders saw the 4.4 million acres as a matter of hurting the livelihoods of hunters and ranchers, Fleetwood said, who stood to lose access to below-market-rate rents for their cattle to graze on.
“Western ranchers didn’t like it, figuring that outright privatization of Western land was going to lead to developers and foreign investors taking over and cutting off their access.”
By 1983, Reagan’s sell-off board was disbanded. They ended up selling only 4,600 acres.
The lesson, Fleetwood said, is that public lands are extremely popular with the general public. From ranchers to skiers to environmentalists, it’s bipartisan to provide cheap, plentiful access to open land.
It’s this decades-long consensus that Lee broke with a few weeks ago.
In recent years, some of the last remaining survivors of the Watt staff from the Reagan Administration have reheated some of the same thinking that Reagan used to justify the liquidation of public land. William Pendley, who served in both Reagan and Trump’s interior departments and the influential Mountain States Legal Foundation, has pushed the idea of selling public land in recent years as a solution to the housing crisis.
Hunters and ranchers are unimpressed with Lee’s smaller vision, telling him they want the whole bill killed.
The Outdoor Alliance has been successfully channeling public frustration over the bill into a letter-writing campaign to representatives in Congress.
“Everyone’s voice matters on this,” said Hawkins, of the Outdoor Alliance. “By writing a letter, that goes on the record. They [Congressional leaders] read those letters. Their office knows what this means to their district.”
