San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Local control’ is spreading in fire country
In February 2019, a year and a half before the Creek Fire tore through a then-unprecedented 379,895 acres of California forestland, Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig gave his thoughts on wildfire prevention to the local Central Valley newspaper the Clovis Roundup.
“Blame for the condition of our forests rests with all of us,” he said.
A fair and reasonable take. But that was in 2019. In the wake of recent megafires, such levelheadedness appears to have become a less discussed casualty of the blazes.
The problem particularly flared up with the finding by the U.S. Forest Service that the cause of the Creek Fire was “undetermined; probable lightning,” which made for an unsatisfying narrative among many of Magsig’s constituents. If ignition was an act of God, that made the task of assigning blame a far more challenging one.
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups took turns getting blamed for the overstocked forest, but they have proved to be inadequate scapegoats. They don’t “own” the land – it’s the federal government that holds that trust. Now, government agencies deemed to be obstacles to logging and clearing the fire fuel load, like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service, have become the targets of choice.
As the locals have lashed out, Magsig’s position has hardened — and, in the town hall meetings his office has organized, a new and arguably dangerous
phrase has entered his lexicon: “local control.”
He first brought the idea up with Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Gavin Newsom when they visited the Creek Fire disaster area in September 2020. And in a letter of Oct. 25 of this year to the Fish and Wildlife Service, Magsig wrote that “those who work or have businesses in the mountains ... naturally favor proper and effective forest management. State and Federal laws and regulations have contributed to the forest’s current condition and the devastating outcomes we’ve experienced. My constituents and I believe it’s best to leave the forest preservation and management
to local control.”
So much for “blame rests with all of us.”
In California, as in much of the West, the definition of “local control” tends to shift with your location — at a school board meeting on a public school campus, in a county planning commission meeting or standing in a national forest. The phrase may sound harmless enough, but context is everything.
Local control in the context of federal land ownership has a history with several aliases, including Sagebrush Rebellion (1970s-80s) and County Supremacy (1990s and ongoing). Under any name, it signifies the same: a power-grab and land-grab strategy that calls for taking federal public lands away from Americans who don’t live in the neighborhood — and turning those lands and resources over to locals who “naturally” know how best to handle them, including local governments easily pressured by narrow financial interests and industries.
The problem is that this taking over of federal lands is unconstitutional, running up against the supremacy and property clauses of the U.S. Constitution. The federal Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and it gives Congress power over the property of the United States, including the nation’s land holdings.
Nonetheless, over the past few decades, high-profile cases involving the elimination of federal control over Western lands have ignited into dangerous standoffs. Most have been associated with grazing permits on federal rangeland. Such was the case with the Bundy clan, particularly Ammon and his father, Cliven, local-control activists who engaged in an armed standoff with federal officials on the family ranch in Nevada in 2014 — because Cliven refused to pay grazing fees for running his cattle on federal land.
In 2016, Ammon Bundy went on to join fellow local-control activists Dwight and Steven Hammond, convicted rangeland arsonists and armed occupiers of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. (The Hammonds were pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2018.) Ammon Bundy has continued pushing his local-control agenda through his People’s Rights organization, which
counts militia members, anti-maskers, conspiracists, doomsday preppers and anti-vaxxers among its core membership. Ammon himself hates politicians so much he can’t wait to be one — he announced his campaign for Idaho governor in June.
Mainstream the extreme: That’s the pattern.
The Hammonds and Bundys are better-known faces in the recent reincarnation of the local-control movement, but if what’s going on in Fresno County is any sign, then the local-control foot soldiers in the war against federal stewardship of Western lands have opened a new front in California: one involving the “public safety hazard” of the forests, and of the communities that burn with them during fires.
In a classic blame-the-victim move, the Forest Service — long starved of funding to adequately address the fuel loading in climate-changed forests — is quickly becoming the preferred political football.
More thoughtful local involvement with federal forest management would be welcome — and if that was what “local control” meant, I could see the need for it. Yet in and around the Creek Fire burn zone, the political attacks on environmentalists and government agencies now serve as a stalking horse for the activities of local-control extremists.
The bewilderment, frustration, pain and suffering in California’s mega-fire burn scars and adjacent lands are providing fertile grounds for radicalization and recruitment to antigovernment groups – far beyond just Fresno County.
Check the Facebook pages of any Northern California or Southern Oregon county with a “State of Jefferson” organization.
Amid petitions and rally announcements and write-ups of the 80-plus-year history of the movement, you’ll find statements like this, from Bob Chard, director in Oregon for State of Jefferson, posted to the Sierra County (California) for State of Jefferson group on Facebook: “How many acres of BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land are situated in any of the original 13 states? The answer is, there are none in any of them! So, when we become a new state, we can come in with the same status as they have no BLM lands within our borders! They will become State of Jefferson lands and now be under local control. The Forest Service lands will most likely come right along with BLM lands.” Chard goes on to talk about Utah’s attempts to enact just such a “land transfer” and the need for State of Jefferson activists to stay fired up.
The land-grab activities of antigovernment groups might benefit local interests like cattle ranching and the forest products industry (at least for a time), but that benefit comes at great cost to all Americans who believe that there are some public properties that are poorly served by being turned into private profits.
Turning this part of the Sierra National Forest into the Fresno County Woodlot will not solve the forest’s problems. Local-control movements, at their best, too often invoke an ineffectual fairy-tale nostalgia for a long-gone mythic West. At their worst, they advocate for cynical and dangerous handovers of public assets into private hands and foment radical antigovernment hostility.