#public-land-transfer

#public-land-transfer

"Nobody is asking for this. None of the farm groups want this. No one in conservation wants this. Nobody." Robert Bonnie, former Forest Service undersecretary, highlights widespread opposition to the reorganization.

"They need to be treating this like the fire that it is," said Tyler Norod, president of Westbrook Development Corporation, which builds affordable housing in Maine.

That number represents roughly 7% of the state's land and waters. It also corresponds with the amount of land the federal government promised it would hold as reservations for Indigenous tribes after California joined the union in 1850. Congress ultimately rejected these treaties in a secret meeting - after pressure from the state - and failed to notify tribes, many of whom upheld their end of the agreement to relocate.

When California became a state in 1850, officials signed 18 treaties setting aside millions of acres for tribal reservations. Congress killed the deals in secret after pressure from state leaders. Many tribes had already moved, trusting the promises. Now California wants to make good.

These displays and materials are among several hundred that managers have flagged at hundreds of national park locations since last summer in response to administration orders to scrub sites of 'partisan ideology,' descriptions that 'disparage' Americans, or materials that stray from a focus on the nation's 'beauty, abundance, or grandeur.'

I'm not so sure that I've changed. I do not believe that we're going to go out and wholesale land from the federal government. Federal law says that we can't do that from the BLM itself.

The only interest he has in our parks is the money he can make from them. Case in point is how Socha, as an executive for the hospitality company Delaware North, sued the NPS for $51 million for the naming rights to Yosemite National Park, Ahwahnee, Wawona, etc., claiming they were the company's intellectual property. Twenty-two years as concessionaire entitles them to own and profit from the names? How absurd and disrespectful.

The Land Report published its annual survey on the top landowners in the US. Billionaire Stanley Kroenke ranked No. 1 with over 2 million acres. The family of Subway cofounder Peter Buck also made the list.

The legislation focuses on reducing regulatory and procedural barriers to housing development, aiming to accelerate the construction of both market-rate and affordable housing nationwide. The Housing for the 21st Century Act is the House counterpart to the ROAD to Housing Act. The bill seeks to accelerate housing development by encouraging zoning reforms, supporting accessory dwelling units and small multifamily projects, and lowering costs tied to permitting and design. It also includes grants for preapproved building plans intended to shorten approval timelines.

The National Park Service has updated its policy to discourage visitors from defacing a picture of President Trump on this year's pass. The use of an image of Trump on the 2026 pass rather than the usual picture of nature has sparked a backlash, sticker protests, and a lawsuit from a conservation group. The $80 annual America the Beautiful pass gives visitors access to more than 2,000 federal recreation sites.

Western water law is based on the prior appropriation doctrine, which gives the first entity to make "beneficial use" of water the right to keep on using that amount, even if that means that upstream "junior" users' spigots will get shut off. By the early 1900s, a rapidly growing California was enthusiastically diverting the Colorado River, with huge irrigation districts gobbling up the senior water rights.

It is proposing: 670 apartments, 101 of which will be offered at below market rates, Three office buildings totaling 740,000 square feet of office space (which is large enough for 2,960 employees using the benchmark of 250 square feet per worker), A 15,000-square-foot childcare center, 40,000-square-feet of retail space and 3 acres of open space, including a dog park and 1.5 acre "redwood lawn."

Many of them were built for purposes that no longer exist - cattle drives, mining prospecting, early U.S. Forest Service fire patrols - while others were packed by the footprints of the Chumash people well before the colonization of North America. Sections of trail cling to steep slopes that seem to barely resist gravity, shedding soil and stone with each winter storm.

Over the past year, a wave of high-profile development proposals - from oil fields and mining roads to timber projects - has reshaped a fast-moving debate, propelling Alaska into the center of the national conversation over how to balance energy production with conservation. These projects have revived long-running tensions over what the state's public lands are for, and who they ultimately benefit.