Man Guilty Of ‘Recreational Bulldozing’ On Public Land

A Fruitland man has pleaded guilty to destroying government property with what one state official called “recreational bulldozing” on public lands near Salmon.

Sentencing is scheduled July 5 for William Villers, who entered his plea Wednesday in exchange for a federal prosecutors’ promise not to seek the maximum punishment.

Villers could face up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

As his trial opened Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Monte Stiles offered Villers a plea bargain that would have reduced the charge from a felony to a misdemeanor. But Villers rejected the deal, saying the U.S. Constitution would protect him.

“I got stupid because I was listening to the wrong people,” he said Wednesday. But after an attorney told him his defense would never work, “I guess you would say I got a bad case of religion last night.”

Villers was charged with malicious destruction of government property for tearing up alpine soils on a mining claim he never filed with federal land managers.

He was using the case to assert a states’ rights doctrine questioning federal ownership and regulation of public lands.

Witnesses testifying Tuesday said Villers had scraped topsoil and dug trenches in 71 places, moving 11,000 cubic yards of dirt on an eightacre spread of the McKim Creek drainage near the Salmon River about halfway between Salmon and Challis.

The property is in the Salmon National Forest and on other public lands.

Villers filed a claim with Lemhi County, but otherwise ignored requirements to file with the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management and present a reclamation plan to the Idaho Department of Lands.

The Forest Service ordered Villers to stop work last June 1, apparently after he had been at it two weeks or more. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in January.

Before Villers pleaded guilty, Stiles called a number of witnesses to testify about federal ownership and jurisdiction, and to characterize Villers’ dirt-moving as unorthodox mineral exploration without any apparent purpose.

Ben Gomm of the Idaho Department of Lands said Villers did not appear to be seriously mining.

“I called it recreational bulldozing,” he said, because the exploration was not done in a way that could have exposed any ore.