Earlier today I was a guest on the podcast of Nevada Policy, a think tank I worked for between 1997 and 2002. (I’ll let you know when the episode is uploaded.) I suppose I could rerun a piece of my work from back in that era. But D. Dowd Muska wasn’t quite as skilled a writer then as he was a decade later, so here’s a 2013 column inspired by Nevada Policy-published research.
■ ■ ■
To the left of the 100th meridian west, the federal government is large and in charge.
Washington controls more than 30 percent of the acreage in ten states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. The Silver State (84.5 percent) and The Last Frontier (69.1 percent) bear the heaviest burden of D.C.-based “ownership.”
The feds’ total holdings are literally immeasurable. A 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service found that a reliable figure “is not definitively known.” A safe estimate is 650 million acres — nearly 30 percent of the nation.
Outside the West, land is overwhelmingly in the hands of homeowners, business, trusts, states, and municipalities. In the East, the feds control miniscule portions of Connecticut (0.3 percent), Maine (1.1 percent), and Pennsylvania (2.1 percent). The story’s the same in the South — e.g., Texas (1.8 percent), Alabama (2.7 percent), and South Carolina (4.6 percent). Even in the Midwest, federal control is weak: Iowa (0.3 percent), Ohio (1.1 percent), and Missouri (3.8 percent).
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to No Dowd About It to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.