The Bureau of Land Management is headquartered in Washington on C Street, fixed firmly within the massive and imposing stone building that houses the Department of the Interior.
Architecturally, government buildings in Washington are designed to convey a sense of permanence and importance, but in a practical sense they sometimes also signal bureaucracies removed from the people they serve. In the BLM’s case, that is both figuratively and literally true.
A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, along with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, want to change that by moving BLM headquarters to one of 12 Western states. Utah is prominently in that mix.
This move would make sense. The vast majority of land the BLM manages is in those 12 states. In Utah, it manages 66.5 percent of the state’s entire landmass. The figure in Nevada is 81.1 percent.
This means the bureau oversees vast areas rich in natural resources such as oil, natural gas and coal, and that it makes decisions about hunting, fishing, public access to hiking trails and rules concerning recreational activities such as off-road riding on all-terrain vehicles — all with impacts on the people who inhabit the small percentage of privately owned land. It awards leases for extraction that impact the environment, and it sometimes forbids human access in ways that adversely affect local economies.
For bureaucrats to make these sorts of impactful decisions from an imposing stone building many miles away naturally breeds a feeling among Westerners that their needs are neither understood nor respected.
Environmentalists, whose desires often face opposition from politicians on local and state levels, are naturally skeptical of this idea. They note that Zinke has expressed a desire to turn back some environmental regulations and to expand opportunities for energy and mineral extraction.
Only by living among the people of the West can federal bureaucrats really understand what it means to be a Westerner.
But theirs is a mostly political concern based on current conditions. It has little to do with the overriding need to bring an agency closer to the people it serves. Presidential administrations will shift from conservative and liberal and back again through the years, each putting its ideological stamp on BLM priorities. Having the agency headquartered in the West, however, would add a new level of accountability to the many and varied needs of the region.
The tug-of-war among environmental preservation, extraction, tourism and recreation will continue regardless of where the BLM is located, but only by living among the people of the West can federal bureaucrats really understand what it means to be a Westerner.
The Interior Department’s assistant secretary for policy, management and budget made a recent visit to Utah. She toured Ogden and participated in a roundtable discussion with Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, and Gov. Gary Herbert.
Naturally, Bishop touted Ogden as an ideal location for a BLM headquarters. Herbert, in turn, seemed less focused on Ogden and more so on Utah in general, telling the assistant secretary, “… there is no better place to bring the headquarters” than the Beehive State.
This isn’t like attempts to lure an Amazon headquarters. Utah wouldn’t see a windfall in economic development by becoming home to the new BLM headquarters. That isn’t what this is about.
It’s about putting an often-ignored state in remote Western regions squarely in the faces of federal decision-makers who would live, raise families and perform the daily tasks of living in Utah.
Quite naturally, that would lead to better informed public-land decisions in a mostly publicly owned state.