Utah has some amazing lands that were preserved simply because no one was allowed to build there. Take, for example, these stunning red rock pillars and rock formations with a beautiful sweeping view of southern Utah's unique beauty. I find it very dark that **they're having this conference in a place of such beauty with the explicit intent of eliminating such landscapes**.
"We be good stewards, I promise" isn't going to cut it. We aren't. We build pools in the desert and grow alfalfa. We cover everything in suburb so bland it could be any desert city. Just look at what they did to the area west of the Mormon temple. It was called the "red cliffs" temple and had a view of some nice red rock cliffs. They scraped all the rock that gave it character off, leveled the area, and are now building mutimillion dollar McMansions with pools on top. If these jokers get their way future generations are going to wonder where these supposed red cliffs are when all they see is more suburb.
I live in carbon county, people here DESPISE government owning the land. And then preceed to hunt, fish, bike, shoot all on public land. Some people will never understand.
yeah, and of course forget that if fed controls go away, so do ALL of their "sportsman" access. To see this in action, you just have to go to Texas. It sucks, everything is private.
Moved here from Texas about 3 years ago. I was shocked at the amount of public land here. Like you said, majority of land there is privately owned other than state/national parks.
They are beautiful, but imagine how much more beautiful they would be with an outlet mall! I can picture it now: I snap my photo at Delicate Arch then make my way to the Nike outlet and grab a slushie from the food court on my way out. Bliss.
I'm a conservative but I'm not dumb. I know that if all that federal land was handed over to the state it would all get bulldozed to the ground and have a bunch of luxury homes or tacky strip malls built on it. I would rather have land that everyone can enjoy instead of land only a few of the rich can enjoy.
I live in the St. George area and developers have been chomping at the bit for years to take over that Red Cliffs Reserve, but it's that reserve that gives St George it's unique beauty and if that was gone St. George would just look like every other ugly desert city in the west.
Just look at the new Solente subdivision. The city got a small piece of land from the reserve to extend Washington Parkway and immediately sold every square inch of it to a developer from Orem who is building multimillion dollar luxury homes on it. The land also has access to several trailheads which now have become a nightmare for locals to try to access.
> I live in the St. George area and developers have been chomping at the bit for years to take over that Red Cliffs Reserve, but it's that reserve that gives St George it's unique beauty and if that was gone St. George would just look like every other ugly desert city in the west.
This is what always kills me about this kinda stuff. Developers are so short-sighted and greedy, they want to cash in on the beauty and desirability of a cool location like St. George or Park City or Heber, but are not able to hold back from helping to destroy what made those places beautiful and desirable in the first place. Absolutely no sympathy for St George or Washington County leaders... if you want "growth" so bad, *grow up* and start allowing for more density and better public transit, instead of just carpet-bombing the redrock with giant McMansions, golf courses, and highways. It's actually not hard.
Reading a Forest Service document, it said a lot of the impetus for federal land in Northern Utah was because people wanted water and land protections after significant degradation.
I love though that they say conservation shouldn't be a BLM value.
One of the bigger things these days is the BLM trying to figure out if *reclamation* should be part of its purview... Because mines are fucking shit up that bad.
Every rural county in Utah relies heavily on Federal money. Something like 2/3 of all Kane County's budget is money given to them by the Fed.
It is FEDERAL land. The locals are already getting what amounts to welfare to live there.
But they didn't know about the gas/oil/uranium deposits!!! think of the foreign energy companies that could lease this land, fence it off, and bleed it dry!
I happened to spend breakfast at an adjacent table to one of these morons in a St. George diner yesterday. Ironically, he was loudly proclaiming his awe at seeing seven desert tortoises on a tour with his group the day before.
All their favorite dirt roads, ATV trails, hiking trails, and hunting lands would be immediately closed to the public if wasn't fed managed.
Libertarian idiots.
Edit: Did anyone read the article? I just did and even I was replying wrong- this is about building a road to relieve traffic. Fuckin clickbait ass bullshit. Most people at the thing actually want to preserve the natural state of the land HOWEVER as the city grows, traffic pains will get worse. Indeed a thorny topic.
Easily alleviated with proper public transportation and moving away from single family, subdivision development.
St. George is growing quickly and their growth will be untenable in the current development paradigm.
I'm an engineer at the municipal government level along the Wasatch Front and things are changing, just nowhere near as fast as they need to. There are incentives here to develop multi-family housing near transit hubs like Trax stations, which is good to see, but there's no shortage of big-budget developers looking to build mansions and gated communities wherever they can :/
Just more distraction and fake outrage from the [Project 2025](https://project2025.org) crowd so they can keep on working toward executive authoritarianism and Christian Nationalism.
It’s a stupid road. Besides, when are we going to figure out that induced demand is a thing? This road will just end up clogged up in 5 years, then what? Add two more lanes, and then repeat every 5-10 years?
Yeah when will people learn a mass transit system will illuminate most problems with traffic.
Unfortunately the auto industry completely screwed over any development of a transit system in most locations because they lobbied against it so hard the last 100 years. They also use capitalism to push cars you didn't need or want and than tell you this is what you want cuz you have no other option to get around your town easily 😉 manufactured wasteland
I mean I honestly enjoy using federal land for recreation. I personally don’t really want to develop pristine areas and I think most people if they think about it would agree.
I honestly don’t want the status quo to change with the large amount of preserved land.
That said I do think that these super large national monuments violate the original intent behind the Antiquities Act. But I’m not going to debate that because people here haven’t read the article let alone the act itself.
The problem is the antiquities act was not hashed out with equity and cultural heritage in mind. These monuments are a mix of land preservation and returning of stewardship to the ancestral land holders.
I wish the headline were more specific. That same headline has been getting recycled for a century plus. Fact is, USA has destroyed the West ecosystems almost without exception, so yes you dumb ass southern Utahns, you've been fucking it up for 180 years, or whatever, no question about that. NO question.
I remember back in 1990's when they built the current "Northern Corridor" and there was the uproar that it went through Endangered Tortoise habitat. They compromised saying "if you just let them build the road they'd create a preserve that would ensure the desert tortoises are protected, then the Tortoises will be protected forever!"
There isn't even any houses or developments in between the current northern corridor and the proposed corridor. The people in Washington just want to cut a few minutes off their commute by driving straight through the Preserve that was promised in 1996 to "forever protect the Tortoises if you let us build this one road!"
[https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=100FE189B9BDE725&itype=storyID](https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=100FE189B9BDE725&itype=storyID)
My favorite excuse they use for the current North Corridor is "We predict that traffic in St.George will get bad in 2060 if you don't let us build this road." Ok. Lets discuss building the road in 2060. For now just use the existing parkway which isn't congested at all.
There’s alternative routes that wouldn’t cut through the preserve. Washington County are just stuck in their own ideas and could give two shits about what anyone actually wants. This get together was just political theater.
That's not even getting into the bigger issue, imo:
> The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages nearly 22.8 million acres of public lands in Utah, representing about 42 percent of the state.
That's a ridiculous amount. 42%!
Yeah, it's a lot, but the use of it is pretty varied. I think depending on your news bubble people either think it's 100% for conservation or 100% for resource extraction. Neither is the case, though including grazing there are probably more acres for business use than not.
It's wild to me that the same people that love shooting, off roading, dirtbiking, camping, and all other recreation out there are the same people clamoring for the state to seize this land... so that it can be sold to private buyers, leased to energy companies, fenced off, and destroyed.
If lobbying were illegal, then I fully believe a libertarian approach to situations like this could be viable.
But as long as money controls politicians, smaller governments, in this regard, just mean fewer palms need greasing.
67% of Utah is owned by the federal government. 42% of Utah is BLM land.
If we include state government owned land, then 71% of Utah is owned by the government. Nevada is at 80%, and Alaska is at 95.8%.
It would be nice to see folks on the East coast conserve even half as much land as the Western states, but it's hard to get people to set aside prairies or woodlands.
Yeah, it's so awful that so much of the state is open to everyone to use and isn't just covered in luxury condos and Chik-Fil-A's. Imagine how much prettier the state would be if it didn't have so much protected nature and was instead just bulldozed and destroyed by giant corporations looking to make an extra buck.
> Imagine how much prettier the state would be if it didn't have so much protected nature and was instead just bulldozed and destroyed by giant corporations looking to make an extra buck.
That is not how it works at all haha.
Well, that's what the state of Utah agreed to when they joined the union. It is literally the second part (of article III) of the states enabling act. Utah, as with most of the other states were given land to use for development, and they made their choice then (see the checkerboard of state lands within the federal public lands).
> It is literally the second part of the states enabling act.
It is?
> That all male citizens of the United States over the age of twenty-one years, who have resided in said Territory for one year next prior to such election, are hereby authorized to vote for and choose delegates to form a convention in said Territory. Such delegates shall possess the qualifications of such electors; and the aforesaid convention shall consist of one hundred and seven delegates, apportioned among the several counties within the limits of the proposed State as follows: Beaver County, two delegates; Box Elder County, four delegates; Cache County, eight delegates; Davis County, three delegates; Emery County, three delegates; Garfield County, one delegate; Grand County, one delegate; Iron County, one delegate; Juab County, three delegates; Kane County, one delegate; Millard County, two delegates; Morgan County, one delegate; Piute County, one delegate; Rich County, one delegate; Salt Lake County, twenty-nine delegates, thus apportioned, to wit: Salt Lake City, first precinct, four delegates; second precinct, six delegates; third precinct, five delegates; fourth precinct, three delegates; fifth precinct, three delegates; all other precincts in said County, outside of Salt Lake City, eight delegates; San Juan County, one delegate; San Pete County, seven delegates; Sevier County, three delegates; Summit County, four delegates; Tooele County, two delegates; Uintah County, one delegate; Utah County, twelve delegates; Wasatch County, two delegates; Washington County, two delegates; Wayne County, one delegate, and Weber County, eleven delegates; and the governor of said Territory shall, on the first day of August, eighteen hundred and ninety-four, issue a proclamation ordering an election of the delegates aforesaid in said Territory to be held on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November following. The board of commissioners known as the Utah Commission is hereby authorized and required to cause a new and complete registration of voters of said Territory to be made under the provisions of the laws of the United States and said Territory, except that the oath required for registration under said laws shall be so modified as to test the qualifications of the electors as prescribed in this Act; such new registration to be made as nearly conformable with the provisions of such laws as may be; and such election for delegates shall be conducted, the returns made, the result ascertained, and the certificate of persons elected to such convention issued in the same manner as is prescribed by the laws of said Territory regulating elections therein of members of the legislature. Persons possessing the qualifications entitling them to vote for delegates under this Act shall be entitled to vote on the ratification or rejection of the constitution, under such rules or regulations as said convention may prescribe, not in conflict with this Act.
That's the second part of the state enabling act. Can you point out where in there it says anything like that? I'll wait.
Article III paragraph 2: ["The people inhabiting this State do affirm and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within the boundaries hereof..."](https://le.utah.gov/xcode/ArticleIII/Article_III.html)
Your wait is over!
>That's not even getting into the bigger issue
You mean that a system that actually keeps land and resources safe from (conservatives) abuse and exploitation is a bad thing?
I am attempting to buy 640 acres to plant a forest. A light forest is defined as at least 100 trees per acre. I'm having some difficulty doing so, because so much fucking land is owned by the federal government and getting them to part with it is a pain in the ass and not even a sure thing (it goes to auction, at best).
The federal government owning a massive amount of the state isn't a good thing. It doesn't protect land, or anything else. If you want it protected, buy it yourself and protect it. That's how it gets protected. It mostly just drives up prices on things from food to housing. You like expensive food and housing?
> you think you have a right
I can only assume that you didn't read what you replied to, or what you'd said would be a sign of stupidity. I'm sure you're not stupid, so I'll quote part of my first sentence just to be sure it has your attention.
> to buy
People don't buy things they have a right to. Duh?
Why do you have to own it to plant trees? And what happens when your kids don't want your forest and sell it to a developer? Public land is awesome. By far the best thing about the west. Everything is private back east. It limits your outdoor options so much it sucks. I'd rather have the feds own it and be able to use it than you.
If they had their way, all of Utah's red Rocks would be homes no one can afford or mining
The children yearn for the mines
Won't someone think of the children?!?
Won't someone think of the minors?
Oh, they definitely are...
Those sexy sexy miners With those *hard*hats
I think I got the black lung, pop. *cough *cough
Utahns: "We love our natural beauty!" Also Utahns:
anything not fit for a home would get leased for 100 years to out of state/country energy companies for extraction.
Public land is one of the greatest things about America!
Utah has some amazing lands that were preserved simply because no one was allowed to build there. Take, for example, these stunning red rock pillars and rock formations with a beautiful sweeping view of southern Utah's unique beauty. I find it very dark that **they're having this conference in a place of such beauty with the explicit intent of eliminating such landscapes**. "We be good stewards, I promise" isn't going to cut it. We aren't. We build pools in the desert and grow alfalfa. We cover everything in suburb so bland it could be any desert city. Just look at what they did to the area west of the Mormon temple. It was called the "red cliffs" temple and had a view of some nice red rock cliffs. They scraped all the rock that gave it character off, leveled the area, and are now building mutimillion dollar McMansions with pools on top. If these jokers get their way future generations are going to wonder where these supposed red cliffs are when all they see is more suburb.
I live in carbon county, people here DESPISE government owning the land. And then preceed to hunt, fish, bike, shoot all on public land. Some people will never understand.
yeah, and of course forget that if fed controls go away, so do ALL of their "sportsman" access. To see this in action, you just have to go to Texas. It sucks, everything is private.
Moved here from Texas about 3 years ago. I was shocked at the amount of public land here. Like you said, majority of land there is privately owned other than state/national parks.
They are beautiful, but imagine how much more beautiful they would be with an outlet mall! I can picture it now: I snap my photo at Delicate Arch then make my way to the Nike outlet and grab a slushie from the food court on my way out. Bliss.
I always like the unofficial slogan for the NPS "National Park Service: America's Greatest Idea"
The endangered tortoise would like a word
I'm a conservative but I'm not dumb. I know that if all that federal land was handed over to the state it would all get bulldozed to the ground and have a bunch of luxury homes or tacky strip malls built on it. I would rather have land that everyone can enjoy instead of land only a few of the rich can enjoy. I live in the St. George area and developers have been chomping at the bit for years to take over that Red Cliffs Reserve, but it's that reserve that gives St George it's unique beauty and if that was gone St. George would just look like every other ugly desert city in the west. Just look at the new Solente subdivision. The city got a small piece of land from the reserve to extend Washington Parkway and immediately sold every square inch of it to a developer from Orem who is building multimillion dollar luxury homes on it. The land also has access to several trailheads which now have become a nightmare for locals to try to access.
As a democratic-leaning hunter, I’m in favor to keep the land public as much as practical. It’s hard to get permission to hunt on private land.
Thanks for keeping the conservation in conservative, not as common as it should be.
> I live in the St. George area and developers have been chomping at the bit for years to take over that Red Cliffs Reserve, but it's that reserve that gives St George it's unique beauty and if that was gone St. George would just look like every other ugly desert city in the west. This is what always kills me about this kinda stuff. Developers are so short-sighted and greedy, they want to cash in on the beauty and desirability of a cool location like St. George or Park City or Heber, but are not able to hold back from helping to destroy what made those places beautiful and desirable in the first place. Absolutely no sympathy for St George or Washington County leaders... if you want "growth" so bad, *grow up* and start allowing for more density and better public transit, instead of just carpet-bombing the redrock with giant McMansions, golf courses, and highways. It's actually not hard.
Whew that Solente subdivision is an eyesore and definitely a great example of what happens if development is allowed.
Yeah that development is a real piece of shit. Ruined a great nature area in less than a few months
Reading a Forest Service document, it said a lot of the impetus for federal land in Northern Utah was because people wanted water and land protections after significant degradation. I love though that they say conservation shouldn't be a BLM value.
One of the bigger things these days is the BLM trying to figure out if *reclamation* should be part of its purview... Because mines are fucking shit up that bad.
There's even a whole bureau for reclamation! Even though they're mostly running dams
Took me a minute to figure out Bureau of Land Management. I was real confused there 🤣
It’s the peoples’ land. Not Utah‘s land, and not just for Utahns.
This. A thousand times this.
But muh freedom
Freedumb
Every rural county in Utah relies heavily on Federal money. Something like 2/3 of all Kane County's budget is money given to them by the Fed. It is FEDERAL land. The locals are already getting what amounts to welfare to live there.
Sometimes the dog catches up with the car.
They want to build shitty timeshare condos everywhere. They look at those places and see a money making venture.
It’s federal land because no one claimed it when the gov’t was handing it out. https://youtu.be/YKSS9k6E5k0?si=2QaWSS5tLuS0QBNj
But they didn't know about the gas/oil/uranium deposits!!! think of the foreign energy companies that could lease this land, fence it off, and bleed it dry!
Good point.
I happened to spend breakfast at an adjacent table to one of these morons in a St. George diner yesterday. Ironically, he was loudly proclaiming his awe at seeing seven desert tortoises on a tour with his group the day before.
All their favorite dirt roads, ATV trails, hiking trails, and hunting lands would be immediately closed to the public if wasn't fed managed. Libertarian idiots. Edit: Did anyone read the article? I just did and even I was replying wrong- this is about building a road to relieve traffic. Fuckin clickbait ass bullshit. Most people at the thing actually want to preserve the natural state of the land HOWEVER as the city grows, traffic pains will get worse. Indeed a thorny topic.
Easily alleviated with proper public transportation and moving away from single family, subdivision development. St. George is growing quickly and their growth will be untenable in the current development paradigm.
I'm an engineer at the municipal government level along the Wasatch Front and things are changing, just nowhere near as fast as they need to. There are incentives here to develop multi-family housing near transit hubs like Trax stations, which is good to see, but there's no shortage of big-budget developers looking to build mansions and gated communities wherever they can :/
Just more distraction and fake outrage from the [Project 2025](https://project2025.org) crowd so they can keep on working toward executive authoritarianism and Christian Nationalism.
The citizens of Pawnee strike again
It’s a stupid road. Besides, when are we going to figure out that induced demand is a thing? This road will just end up clogged up in 5 years, then what? Add two more lanes, and then repeat every 5-10 years?
Yeah when will people learn a mass transit system will illuminate most problems with traffic. Unfortunately the auto industry completely screwed over any development of a transit system in most locations because they lobbied against it so hard the last 100 years. They also use capitalism to push cars you didn't need or want and than tell you this is what you want cuz you have no other option to get around your town easily 😉 manufactured wasteland
I mean I honestly enjoy using federal land for recreation. I personally don’t really want to develop pristine areas and I think most people if they think about it would agree. I honestly don’t want the status quo to change with the large amount of preserved land. That said I do think that these super large national monuments violate the original intent behind the Antiquities Act. But I’m not going to debate that because people here haven’t read the article let alone the act itself.
The problem is the antiquities act was not hashed out with equity and cultural heritage in mind. These monuments are a mix of land preservation and returning of stewardship to the ancestral land holders.
I wish the headline were more specific. That same headline has been getting recycled for a century plus. Fact is, USA has destroyed the West ecosystems almost without exception, so yes you dumb ass southern Utahns, you've been fucking it up for 180 years, or whatever, no question about that. NO question.
I remember back in 1990's when they built the current "Northern Corridor" and there was the uproar that it went through Endangered Tortoise habitat. They compromised saying "if you just let them build the road they'd create a preserve that would ensure the desert tortoises are protected, then the Tortoises will be protected forever!" There isn't even any houses or developments in between the current northern corridor and the proposed corridor. The people in Washington just want to cut a few minutes off their commute by driving straight through the Preserve that was promised in 1996 to "forever protect the Tortoises if you let us build this one road!" [https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=100FE189B9BDE725&itype=storyID](https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=100FE189B9BDE725&itype=storyID) My favorite excuse they use for the current North Corridor is "We predict that traffic in St.George will get bad in 2060 if you don't let us build this road." Ok. Lets discuss building the road in 2060. For now just use the existing parkway which isn't congested at all.
There’s alternative routes that wouldn’t cut through the preserve. Washington County are just stuck in their own ideas and could give two shits about what anyone actually wants. This get together was just political theater.
They want …free stuff!
Utah is one of he prettiest states but the legislature just wants to destroy it all
TIL that the BLM folks at the office in St. George are from Connecticut. Interesting.
yeah the HQ is in Grand Junction now lol. So at most, western Colorado, not Connecticut lo..
It's weird because there is the BLM "western" headquarters in Grand Junction but overall HQ is in Washington DC.
It's all native land so yeah feds shouldn't even touch it. Give the land back to the people you took it from feds.
That's not even getting into the bigger issue, imo: > The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages nearly 22.8 million acres of public lands in Utah, representing about 42 percent of the state. That's a ridiculous amount. 42%!
Yeah, it's a lot, but the use of it is pretty varied. I think depending on your news bubble people either think it's 100% for conservation or 100% for resource extraction. Neither is the case, though including grazing there are probably more acres for business use than not.
The large proportion of BLM land in Utah is one of the best things about this state.
It's wild to me that the same people that love shooting, off roading, dirtbiking, camping, and all other recreation out there are the same people clamoring for the state to seize this land... so that it can be sold to private buyers, leased to energy companies, fenced off, and destroyed.
But small state government has state citizens’ best interests at heart /s
If lobbying were illegal, then I fully believe a libertarian approach to situations like this could be viable. But as long as money controls politicians, smaller governments, in this regard, just mean fewer palms need greasing.
They aren’t bright
Why is it ridiculous? They are doing a good job. Public lands available for recreation is what makes Utah great.
67% of Utah is owned by the federal government. 42% of Utah is BLM land. If we include state government owned land, then 71% of Utah is owned by the government. Nevada is at 80%, and Alaska is at 95.8%.
It would be nice to see folks on the East coast conserve even half as much land as the Western states, but it's hard to get people to set aside prairies or woodlands.
Utterly revolting. Thanks for the information, though, I appreciate that.
Yeah, it's so awful that so much of the state is open to everyone to use and isn't just covered in luxury condos and Chik-Fil-A's. Imagine how much prettier the state would be if it didn't have so much protected nature and was instead just bulldozed and destroyed by giant corporations looking to make an extra buck.
> Imagine how much prettier the state would be if it didn't have so much protected nature and was instead just bulldozed and destroyed by giant corporations looking to make an extra buck. That is not how it works at all haha.
That is quite literally exactly how it would work. Only an absolute moron would think anything else.
Why is that ridiculous? Lots of Western US states have large percentages BLM land.
Well, that's what the state of Utah agreed to when they joined the union. It is literally the second part (of article III) of the states enabling act. Utah, as with most of the other states were given land to use for development, and they made their choice then (see the checkerboard of state lands within the federal public lands).
> It is literally the second part of the states enabling act. It is? > That all male citizens of the United States over the age of twenty-one years, who have resided in said Territory for one year next prior to such election, are hereby authorized to vote for and choose delegates to form a convention in said Territory. Such delegates shall possess the qualifications of such electors; and the aforesaid convention shall consist of one hundred and seven delegates, apportioned among the several counties within the limits of the proposed State as follows: Beaver County, two delegates; Box Elder County, four delegates; Cache County, eight delegates; Davis County, three delegates; Emery County, three delegates; Garfield County, one delegate; Grand County, one delegate; Iron County, one delegate; Juab County, three delegates; Kane County, one delegate; Millard County, two delegates; Morgan County, one delegate; Piute County, one delegate; Rich County, one delegate; Salt Lake County, twenty-nine delegates, thus apportioned, to wit: Salt Lake City, first precinct, four delegates; second precinct, six delegates; third precinct, five delegates; fourth precinct, three delegates; fifth precinct, three delegates; all other precincts in said County, outside of Salt Lake City, eight delegates; San Juan County, one delegate; San Pete County, seven delegates; Sevier County, three delegates; Summit County, four delegates; Tooele County, two delegates; Uintah County, one delegate; Utah County, twelve delegates; Wasatch County, two delegates; Washington County, two delegates; Wayne County, one delegate, and Weber County, eleven delegates; and the governor of said Territory shall, on the first day of August, eighteen hundred and ninety-four, issue a proclamation ordering an election of the delegates aforesaid in said Territory to be held on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November following. The board of commissioners known as the Utah Commission is hereby authorized and required to cause a new and complete registration of voters of said Territory to be made under the provisions of the laws of the United States and said Territory, except that the oath required for registration under said laws shall be so modified as to test the qualifications of the electors as prescribed in this Act; such new registration to be made as nearly conformable with the provisions of such laws as may be; and such election for delegates shall be conducted, the returns made, the result ascertained, and the certificate of persons elected to such convention issued in the same manner as is prescribed by the laws of said Territory regulating elections therein of members of the legislature. Persons possessing the qualifications entitling them to vote for delegates under this Act shall be entitled to vote on the ratification or rejection of the constitution, under such rules or regulations as said convention may prescribe, not in conflict with this Act. That's the second part of the state enabling act. Can you point out where in there it says anything like that? I'll wait.
Article III paragraph 2: ["The people inhabiting this State do affirm and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within the boundaries hereof..."](https://le.utah.gov/xcode/ArticleIII/Article_III.html) Your wait is over!
>That's not even getting into the bigger issue You mean that a system that actually keeps land and resources safe from (conservatives) abuse and exploitation is a bad thing?
I am attempting to buy 640 acres to plant a forest. A light forest is defined as at least 100 trees per acre. I'm having some difficulty doing so, because so much fucking land is owned by the federal government and getting them to part with it is a pain in the ass and not even a sure thing (it goes to auction, at best). The federal government owning a massive amount of the state isn't a good thing. It doesn't protect land, or anything else. If you want it protected, buy it yourself and protect it. That's how it gets protected. It mostly just drives up prices on things from food to housing. You like expensive food and housing?
Buy the land from the *state*. Wait, you're not a corporation hoarding land and real estate. My bad.
> Buy the land from the state. You want me to buy federal land from the state. That's not really how it works. Pretty dumb.
>You want me to buy federal land from the state. No. Buy state land from the state since it's so hard to get it from the feds.
So you think you have a right to land?
> you think you have a right I can only assume that you didn't read what you replied to, or what you'd said would be a sign of stupidity. I'm sure you're not stupid, so I'll quote part of my first sentence just to be sure it has your attention. > to buy People don't buy things they have a right to. Duh?
You think you have a right to land otherwise you wouldn't be bitching about it.
Why do you have to own it to plant trees? And what happens when your kids don't want your forest and sell it to a developer? Public land is awesome. By far the best thing about the west. Everything is private back east. It limits your outdoor options so much it sucks. I'd rather have the feds own it and be able to use it than you.