LETTER: Public lands bill privatizes too much real estate
The developer/CEO/sprawl lobby is pushing Congress to privatize 42,000 acres of our public lands – an area bigger than the city of Miami – for more Las Vegas and Henderson urban sprawl, surrounding Sloan Canyon and other imperiled places (Friday Review-Journal).
Extreme drought, a drying-up Lake Mead and climate science show us we don’t have the water for the Clark County lands bill. For our health, we need to clean up air pollution, but massive new urbanization would only make our air worse.
The sprawl CEOs can access plenty of land now. More than 30,000 acres are open for development in the existing urban valley. We need truly affordable housing, but there is nothing in this bill to guarantee affordability.
New conservation designations on some remaining public lands are decent, but not as handcuffed to a net-loss of lands, quid pro quo deal for corporations to get richer as our quality of life takes a hit.
Our congressional delegation should do the right thing by removing the big privatization of public lands from the Clark County lands bill.
— The writer is a retired ecologist with the Bureau of Land Management.