When I was in college my alma mater was looking for ways to fund a new arena for the basketball team. My school had long been a successful Division II school, but this was in the early years of the wholesale movement to DI, and they wanted on the bandwagon.
One stumbling block was the bandbox where we played our home games. The administration figured the best way to rectify that was to charge students an extra activities fee that would be used to finance the debt the school would incur building a new, larger arena.
The students wanted nothing to do with that fee and each time it was put to a vote, they turned it down. Over and over and over.
The administration didn’t give up, however, and eventually, the measure passed, narrowly. No matter how close the vote, approval was all that mattered. Future students weren’t given the option to not pay the fee when they enrolled. The rules had been changed by the narrowest of margins — the yes votes were a small fraction of the student body — but the issue was settled once the measure passed, though it had been previously rejected, by much larger margins, many times.
I think about that arena process from time to time, usually when I see the strategy playing out in some larger issue in society. Especially when I see it applied to an issue folks in the West take very seriously.
An issue like public access to public lands.
This won’t surprise those of you paying attention, but there’s a well-funded and persistent minority that flatly opposes public access to public lands. This minority would like to end that access where it can, and also end the existence of public lands if they could.
By the way, if a measure ever appears on the ballot of a general election in Montana that would authorize the conversion of public lands to private, it would be destroyed. There’s a whole swath of conservative voters who may want more resource extraction and less regulation on public lands but are a hard NO on selling them off. I suspect that would be the case in Wyoming and Idaho too, though the vote would be closer in both those states.
I’m curious to know about how Utah voters feel about the issue, but that state has its own unique electoral dynamics that make it a little harder to predict.
Fortunately, earlier this month a measure to lend Montana’s support for Utah’s legal effort to gain control of 18.5 million acres of federal land failed in a crashing, 34-66, defeat. The sponsor of the legislation claimed his bill and I suppose Utah’s lawsuit, weren’t part of an effort to sell public lands, but when a bill looks, walks and acts like a public-land selling duck, we need to believe our own dang eyes and smoke it.
There’s a small population of humans in the West for whom the concept of public land torments them in their fever dreams. For the rest of us, it’s a sacred part of our freedom as U.S. citizens to be public landowners. That’s why that corner-crossing decision last month in Wyoming was so important. Corner crossing has nothing to do with taking a private landowner’s property rights. It’s simply about making sure public landowner’s property rights are respected.
We all know the landowner in the Wyoming case wasn’t harmed by the corner crossers. The landowner’s pathetic, foot-long fence at the corner pin makes that clear, as does the despicable actions of the landowner’s employees harassing hunters and wildlife while the corner crossers tried to hunt public land.
The anti-public-access movement won’t go away quietly, however. Like my old university administration, they’ll keep coming back for a bite at the apple until they get what they want.
Because once they win, we could lose our rights forever.