Opinion: State trust land exchange efforts can benefit public lands and development in Utah

With Sen. Mike Lee’s proposed public lands sale proposal excised from the “Big Beautiful Bill” and the Republican leadership likely not revisiting a painful controversy anytime soon, now may be a good time to reflect more deliberately on how some changes to public lands ownership could benefit all public land constituents.

Senator Lee’s rationale for selling public lands was to provide more available land for housing in communities facing unaffordable housing costs. While there are communities in the West where useable public lands are close to housing infrastructure, this is not true to any significant degree in Utah.

I spent the middle part of my career with Utah’s Trust Lands Administration (then called SITLA), with the specific assignment of finding Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands that could be acquired by Utah’s school trust for development, with proceeds going to Utah’s public school endowment.

The pickings near urban areas were sparse. We looked at plat maps everywhere within commuting distance of the Wasatch Front, and found only small, isolated parcels of BLM land that might be suitable for development.

One reason for our lack of success was historic. Unlike many Western states, Utah was settled with a sizable population for 87 years before the Taylor Grazing Act effectively ended homesteading in 1934. Almost every useable parcel of public lands went into private hands, leaving only steep mountainsides in BLM ownership. Forest Service lands along the Wasatch Front were off-limits, but generally also were too steep for development. Even in the St. George area, larger remaining public lands parcels were far from infrastructure, and BLM’s attempts to sell those lands under existing land sales authorities failed.

The reason that we were looking was that Utah’s school trust owns lands with considerable scenic, natural and cultural resource values that almost everyone would agree should not be developed. The obvious solution was to trade natural lands to the federal government for public management, with Utah’s school trust acquiring lands that could be used to generate funds for schools.

There are public lands — including some remaining BLM lands near cities — that do not have notable natural values, and that can be developed for housing, industry and minerals without significant environmental concern. Senator Lee was a strong supporter of SITLA’s land exchange efforts, and a key player in their success. Local and national conservation organizations helped out as well. After 25 years of exchanges, Utah has placed over 600,000 acres of former trust lands into conservation, and released an equivalent amount of public land for development. During the same time period, Utah’s trust land endowments have grown from almost nothing to $3.7 billion, creating a perpetual asset for future generations of Utah students.

The Utah model would work well for most of the other Western states where Senator Lee proposed public land sales. Each of those states has a large professional land management staff, and a portfolio of state trust lands. Each can determine at the state level what pattern of land ownership works best for their state. While there are legal, regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles to large scale federal-state land exchanges that Congress and the current administration need to address, the win-win nature of this approach can avoid the public perception that unilateral land sales are a zero-sum game.