June 17, 2025 10:15 AM UTC

You Can't Un-Sell Public Lands

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• by: Colorado Pols

There are many environmental and public lands decisions made by a particular Congress or a Presidential administration that can be reversed or rolled back by a subsequent change in leadership. One administration may open up oil and gas drilling in a particular area, for example, while the next might decide to change those permissions.

That’s not the case with the latest public lands controversy. Senate Republicans are proposing a large sell-off of public lands to developers who would ostensibly build more housing in these areas — likely expensive second homes for the wealthiest Americans. Regardless of what happens to these public lands if they are sold to private interests, there’s no way to put this decision back in the bottle. No future administrations or congressional majorities can UN-sell public lands once they’ve decided to parcel them off to the highest bidder.

As Elise Schmelzer reports for The Denver Post:

Federal public lands in Colorado eligible for sale under Republicans’ current budget bill include a popular mountain biking area outside of Grand Junction, a beloved hiking area in Durango’s backyard and thousands of acres of forest abutting the Front Range’s Brainard Lake Recreation Area and Indian Peak Wilderness.

More than 14 million acres of federal public land in Colorado could be eligible for sale if Congress passes the current version of the budget bill mandating the sale of a fraction of the nation’s public lands, an analysis by The Wilderness Society found. The eligible parcels cover chunks of mountain, foothills and plains along the Front Range and the Western Slope…

…Republican leadership pitched the land sales as a way to generate revenue and make more land available for housing, though the bill contains no provisions requiring proposed housing to be affordable. The bill states the agencies should prioritize the sale of lands that are nominated by states or local governments, are adjacent to existing development and infrastructure, and are suitable for residential housing.

Nearly all of the proceeds from the sales — estimated at between $5 billion and $10 billion over the next decade — would go to the U.S. Treasury.

The provision sparked broad and fierce criticism from Colorado conservation and recreation communities as well as the state’s Democratic delegation in Congress. Coloradans’ businesses, ways of life and identity rely on public lands, they said.

The proposed sales include 14 million acres of public lands in Colorado alone.

On the Western Slope, eligible lands include chunks of BLM land north of Blue Mesa Reservoir and along the Gunnison River below the reservoir’s output. Swaths of land in the Book Cliffs immediately north of Palisade could be for sale, as well as the popular Lunch Loops mountain bike trail system outside Grand Junction. Durango’s beloved Animas Mountain recreation space is eligible, as is land along the scenic U.S. 550 between Durango and Silverton — known as the Million Dollar Highway.

In the Arkansas River Valley, thousands of acres would be eligible across the Sawatch Range west of Twin Lakes, Buena Vista and Salida. Another large tract covers a huge chunk of mountains north of Aspen, and another nearly all the mountains immediately east of Steamboat Springs, which serve as popular camping, hiking and biking areas.

Closer to the Front Range, nearly all of the Forest Service land in the hills west of the Interstate 25 corridor between Castle Rock and Colorado Springs is eligible. Forest Service land abutting the eastern borders of the popular Brainard Lake Recreation Area and Indian Peaks Wilderness would be eligible as well.

Congressional Republicans may pay lip service to the idea of preserving public lands, but whether or not they follow through on those claims is another matter. Freshman Rep. Jeff “Bread Sandwich” Hurd (R-Grand Junction) told The Denver Post that he opposed a wholesale sell-off of public lands…before he went ahead and voted for President Trump’s “big, beautiful, bullshit bill” anyway. Will Republicans such as Montana Senators Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy hold the line on their own record of opposition to public land sales…or fold like the “Bread Sandwich” when a Senate vote comes up?

There are so many awful things in the GOP’s big bill that shouldn’t ever come anywhere close to becoming law, including massive Medicaid and SNAP cuts and basically giving judicial immunity to President Trump. But the proposal to sell off public lands, which are critical for recreation economies in Colorado and throughout the Western United States, is horrible in its own right.