Possible BLM hopeful: No opinion on land transfers
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — A candidate to lead an agency that oversees public lands totaling one-eighth of the U.S. contends environmentalists mischaracterize her as an advocate of signing those landscapes over to state and local governments and private interests when in fact she has no opinion on the issue.
Cheyenne attorney Karen Buddfalen and others drew dozens of protesters when she addressed a recent land-use forum in western Montana. The protesters spoke out against the movement in the West to wrest control of public lands from federal agencies.
A land-transfer advocate invited Buddfalen to the Ravalli County event Nov. 18, but her legal work has nothing to do with the topic, Budd-falen said.
“It’s not an issue that I was dealing with. But people just assumed that,” Budd-falen said in an interview last week.
Budd-falen is or has been among those under consideration to direct the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department agency that oversees some 386,000 square miles in a dozen Western states.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke interviewed her for the job in March, she said.
Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift declined to say whether Buddfalen was still a candidate or when somebody might be nominated for the director job, which has been vacant since January. But environmentalists have been calling Budd-falen too extreme.
Her legal advocacy has laid the groundwork for those who now want the federal government to relinquish public land, said Greg Zimmerman, deputy director of the Denver-based environmental group Center for Western Priorities.