The Post Editorial Why not move the BLM west?

Much is appealing from where we sit in Colorado, surrounded by millions of acres of public lands, about the possibility of the Bureau of Land Management headquarters coming to the West.

We are thrilled Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma, and Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez, have sparked a conversation within the Department of Interior and top Colorado officials about moving the BLM head- quarters out of the Beltway and into the heart of 245 million acres of public lands it manages.

Most BLM employees are already decentralized in offices across America. According to the agency, 503 full-time employees work in the Washington, D.C., headquarters and 8,403 are employed in the field.

That makes sense for an office responsible for managing public use and private leasing of 10 percent of the nation’s surface lands and a third of America’s mineral resources. We are eager to see if it makes sense to move the rest of those employees closer to the lands and natural resources they manage.

According to the press office at the Department of Interior, the agency is in the process of conducting assessments regarding moving offices and bureaus west and “hopes to have an estimate in the first quarter of the year.”

Legislation introduced by Gardner and Tipton in May would ask the Department of the Interior to develop “a strategy for relocating the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management from Washington, D.C., to a Western state in a manner that will save the maximum amount of taxpayer money practicable.”

We’d be eager to see the results of such studies. If it’s practical and cost-effective to move BLM headquarters west, we are certain many locations would benefit greatly from those federal employees coming to town and the potential job openings that could come with them.

Grand Junction, sitting roughly 40 miles from the Utah border, is in a unique position to serve a large swath of public lands in the western half of Colorado and the eastern half of Utah. Already Grand Junction is home to a field office. The new jobs and huge increase in airport traffic would have a much greater impact on the economy of the Western Slope than that of the Front Range. However, Colorado’s state BLM office is in Denver, and it’s likely such a bureau would need access to a major airport to service the entire nation.

Some might call the original bill chasing a pipe dream — The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel likened Tipton’s vision of BLM headquarters in Grand Junction to Santa Claus arriving to the Grand Valley — but the beauty of dreams is there’s no telling where they could lead.

The Department of Interior employs more than 70,000 people across the nation in nine technical bureaus and a slew of offices. If careful examination of the BLM leads to a bigger vision of taking bureaucracy out of Washington, D.C., and bringing it closer to the people it serves, the whole nation could benefit. The members of The Denver Post’s editorial board are William Dean Singleton, chairman; Mac Tully, CEO and publisher; Chuck Plunkett, editor of the editorial pages; Megan Schrader, editorial writer; and Cohen Peart, opinion editor.