EVERETT — After a Senate ruling on Monday halted Republicans’ plans to sell off 3 million acres of public land across the country, including areas in Snohomish County, Utah Senator Mike Lee began revising the proposal.
Lee’s original proposal he hoped to include in a budget reconciliation bill posed the sale of 3.3 million acres of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service land across 11 Western states over the next five years to build housing.
U.S. Forest Service land around Gold Mountain, parts of Helena Ridge, areas of Mount Pilchuck and popular hiking trails by Lake 22 and Heather Lake would have been up for sale.
On Monday, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled against Lee’s proposal because it didn’t follow a Senate rule barring non-budget items from being included in reconciliation bills.
Later on Monday, Lee posted on X that he planned to remove all Forest Service land from his proposal and significantly reduce the amount of BLM land.
“I’m working closely with the Trump administration to ensure that any federal land sales serve the American people—not foreign governments, not the Chinese Communist Party, and not massive corporations looking to pad their portfolios,” he posted on X on Tuesday. “This land must go to American families. Period.”
On Wednesday, Washington Senator Maria Cantwell hosted a virtual press conference with Boise Mayor Lauren McLean, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers spokesperson Kaden McArthur and others to vocalize opposition to the revised proposal.
“The latest Lee proposal is just one more attempt to see if Congress blinks. A massive change to our public land policy should not be included in a budget bill,” Cantwell said. “We need climbers, hikers, hunters, gateway communities and everyone who loves the outdoors to call their elected representatives right away to say our public lands are not for sale.”
After first being released on June 11, Lee’s proposal received backlash from both sides of the aisle across the country, with conservationists, state governments and hunters expressing the importance of public lands.
“We are facing a mass extinction of wildlife across the globe,” Pilchuck Audubon Society President Bill Derry wrote in an email. “Our cultural and natural resources will be degraded or eliminated. Selling our public lands is a terrible idea without consideration of our children or future generations.”
Eliza Aronson: 425-339-3434; eliza.aronson@heraldnet.com; X: @ElizaAronson.
Eliza’s stories are supported by the Herald’s Environmental and Climate Reporting Fund.
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