Dear Mr. Rahall: 

I am writing on behalf of the Public Lands Foundation (PLF) to express our grave concerns about the draft bill to overhaul the Department of the Interior’s energy leasing program, and to tell you why we believe the proposed reorganization will create more problems and inefficiencies than it will solve.

The Public Lands Foundation is national non-profit conservation organization, whose members are primarily retired former BLM employees who advocates and works for the retention of public lands in public hands, professionally and sustainably managed for the responsible common use and enjoyment of the American people.

Based on what we know about the proposal so far, the PLF endorses the proposals to tighten ethics rules.  Considering the often-large amounts of money involved with energy and minerals, employees with those responsibilities should be required to participate in additional ethics and professional training. Further, we would encourage a review and report to the Congress of the adequacy of management controls relative to bidding, rents, and royalties.

However, the PLF strongly opposes the plan to establish a separate energy and minerals management agency within the Department of the Interior.  Natural resources on public lands are inextricably connected and leasing the rights to one resource is only a small part of the larger problem of determining and dealing with the impacts that the lease may have on other resources and uses of the land.

Such a reorganization would create duplicate functions within the Department and result in costly increases in overhead; it would create an agency with a mission that would set itself aside from and be in apparent conflict with most other Interior agencies; it would result in instance after instance where the left and right hands do not know what the other is doing; it would delay efforts to utilize federal energy and mineral resources (including land for solar and wind); and, it would frustrate efforts and projects to preserve, protect, and develop wildlife habitat, recreation resources, and other land uses because of the onerous decision-making and coordinating processes which would have to be developed.

In 1946, President Truman combined the Grazing Service and the General Land Office to form the Bureau of Land Management in order to eliminate overlapping responsibilities for the same lands.  We learned about the concept of integrated resource management a long time ago.  To tear away an integral part of that concept would be to ignore over 60 years of lessons learned about how we manage our public lands and resources.

We look forward to continuing this conversation with you to improve the management of America’s public lands and resources.

Sincerely,
George Lea President,
Public Lands Foundation 
(letter also sent to BLM and Department of the Interior)