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Land Rush at National Parks
U.S. Steps Up Buying Privately Owned 'Inholdings' Just as Funding Shrinks
By Jim Carlton
Wall Street Journal
WEST GLACIER, Mont.—Federal land managers are stepping up efforts to acquire privately owned acres that lie within national parks, even as funding to do so has been slashed.
The urgency, officials say, comes because of owners like 66-year-old Bob Lundgren, who inherited his father's historic rights to a 120-acre patch of forest inside Glacier National Park's southern boundary, along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River.
Mr. Lundgren's plot was an "inholding," one of the thousands of pockets of private land that were left within the boundaries of U.S. national parks and other protected areas decades ago. Many were historic mining claims, ranches and other properties that predated the parks.
Mr. Lundgren, who is awaiting a heart transplant, wanted to sell the land this year. He preferred it go to the park. Park rangers worried the land might go to a developer if they didn't move quickly, because of his failing health, but they weren't certain they could get the federal funds to buy it.
Federal land managers say it has become more critical for the U.S. to buy inholdings because of an upswing in demand from people wanting to build on the plots.
In the national parks, there are about 2.7 million acres of inholdings, or 3% of the parks' acreage. Congress in 1964 established the Land and Water Conservation Fund to do such things as buy inholdings. But the fund was cut to $322.8 million this year from $637.9 million in 2002.
That left the National Park Service, which shares the fund with state and federal land agencies, $57 million for this year to complete purchases from among $500 million in deals it considers a priority.
Conservationists warn that the fund shortage is delaying purchases, resulting in development on inholdings such as the one in Utah's Zion National Park, where a large home recently sprang up overlooking an iconic canyon view.
"It's pretty big and unsightly," said Bill Dunn, a Zion guide. "People come up here to get away from it all, not feel like they are back in the city."
Some property owners aren't enamored of turning their land over to the parks. At Glacier National Park, Marion Scott said property containing four cabins that has been in her family since the 1940s will go to the park upon her death under a land exchange her late mother agreed to. "There's nothing we can do about it," said the 87-year-old Ms. Scott.
House Republicans want to cut the conservation fund to $66 million in the next fiscal year, prompting a political battle with President Barack Obama's administration, which has called for appropriations of $450 million.
Republican critics say the Interior Department has had decades to acquire lands. "They have not used this money to solve that problem," said Republican Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah; "instead, they have spent the money elsewhere."
When Congress set up the Land and Water Conservation Fund, it was authorized to receive as much as $900 million a year in royalties from offshore oil and gas production. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in an interview that the fund has received that full annual authorization only once, and that Congress has spent a total of $18 billion of that fund on things other than conservation, such as deficit reduction.
"The conservation legacy of the United States is a key economic driver of the economy," Mr. Salazar said, but that reduced funding has forced land managers to target properties under the greatest threat.
In Colorado's Dinosaur National Monument, for example, rangers are trying to acquire a 525-acre ranch slated for potential homes along the Yampa River and listed by the Mirr Ranch Group for $4 million.
The Trust for Public Land, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that assists in such deals, is negotiating to buy the property on behalf of the monument, said Tim Wohlgenant of the trust's Denver office. Ken Mirr, owner of the Denver brokerage, said he is negotiating with several potential buyers. "We're looking for the best offer on the table for price and other terms," he said.
In Montana, Glacier rangers had long eyed Mr. Lundgren's land. Besides affording grizzly bears and other animals a migration corridor, rangers said the thickly wooded property contains important historic remnants of a 1920s hunting lodge that Josephine Doody used to make moonshine.
After Mrs. Doody died in 1936, the land eventually was bought by Mr. Lundgren's father. When Mr. Lundgren, a retired mercantile owner, was diagnosed as needing a heart transplant three years ago, the park increased efforts to buy him out.
Earlier this month, the Trust for Public Land helped broker a deal to pay Mr. Lundgren $900,000, adding the land to Glacier National Park and making Mr. Lundgren happy. "I certainly would have hated for people to float by there" and see a private landowner "behind his cyclone fence," he said.
