Land deals give public more access

Public access continues to gain ground in Eastern Washington with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management completing the latest in a series of large land exchanges.

In December, BLM acquired four parcels of rangeland in Lincoln County totaling 6,743 acres that link with other BLM and state sections to create even larger blocks of public land open to non-motorized recreation.

“This is just another step in what we’ve being doing for the past 15 years or so,” said Kevin Devitt, BLM lands specialist in Spokane.

“Basically it’s a land exchange program where we trade out of our many small, scattered and isolated parcels so we can buy larger areas and consolidate ownership that’s more manageable to provide open space for recreation and wildlife habitat.”

The most recent BLM acquisitions are in sage-steppe lands just west of Davenport. They include 3,860 acres purchased from Sam Schneider for $965,000 and 2,883 acres purchased from the Sandygren family for $814,000, BLM officials said.

“The land values vary depending on the quality of the range and the available water,” Devitt explained.

The new acquisitions link public access to several sections of state Department of Natural Resources land, thousands of acres of the Swanson Lakes Wildlife Area managed by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, plus the 7,200-acre Telford area purchased by BLM for $2.4 million in 2004.

The BLM program has been wildly successful in terms of public access to open spaces for hunting, fishing, horse riding and other recreation. Essentially it involves selling isolated parcels of relatively small acreage in timberlands primarily in Stevens and Ferry counties. These lands are difficult to manage and often have no public access, Devitt said.

The money goes to a fund that’s leveraged with other funding sources to buy much larger blocks of land accessible to the public, he said. The result has been a net gain in land holdings, with some standout examples including more than 20,000 acres along Pacific Lake and Crab Creek near Odessa, about 8,000 acres along the west side of Fishtrap Lake and the 14,000-acre Escure Ranch straddling the Adams-Whitman county line south of Lamont.

BLM has increased its Washington landholdings from about 308,000 acres in 1985 to about 435,000 acres in 2006, said Mark Hatchel, the agency’s realty specialist in Spokane.

In that period, the largest gains have been in Lincoln County, where BLM has increased its holdings from 7,000 acres to about 75,000 acres, Hatchel said.

BLM’s holdings in Okanogan County have increased since the mid-1980s from 55,000 acres to 60,400 acres, he said, adding that holdings in Yakima County have increased only about 500 acres to roughly 26,000 acres. A few parcels are being acquired in the Huckleberry Mountains north of the Spokane Indian Reservation in Stevens County.

“We’ve identified about $8 million worth of BLM land for this phase of our exchanges and we’ve spent nearly $4 million of it in the Telford area,” Devitt said. “We’re still actively working on more acquisitions.”

Grazing will continue on the new BLM lands, but it will be reduced to give more emphasis to wildlife and native plants, he said.

The management security of having these productive wildlife lands become public has already attracted conservation organizations to invest their efforts. Ducks Unlimited is finishing a wetlands project on the Telford area that will flood about 450 acres for the benefit of waterfowl and other critters.

Asked whether the federal government’s land acquisitions were disrupting the tax base in Lincoln County, Devitt said, “Quite the contrary. Back in the early ‘90s, that was an issue in some areas, but 99 percent of what we’re acquiring has been in open space that is taxed at reduced rates,” he said.

“According to our analysis, those lands were getting 25 to 30 cents an acre in taxes. Now that the government owns the land, the payments in lieu of taxes to the county are at least five times greater.”

The program could not go forward without willing sellers. “They have to put up with a lot of red tape, but everyone can thank them for what we’ve gained,” Devitt said.