By Jim Stanford on March 6, 2009
Now in the business of real estate.
Despite public objections and uncertainty whether the sale is even legal, the Bridger-Teton National Forest is pressing ahead with a proposal to sell part of its 15-acre headquarters on North Cache.
The stewards of public land have set up a Web site, Jackson Gateway North, as the News&Guide reported this week, and have hired a consulting company from Washington, D.C., to run the “virtual deal room.”
Who’s invited into the deal room? Realtors and developers. (Although crashers can register here.)
The Web site is a bizarre and stomach-wretching glimpse into a public agency forced to prostitute itself.
The site reads like a bad real estate brochure. Click to enlarge.
The home page features the logos of Jackson Hole Real Estate & Appraisal and Pierson Land Works.
One section borrows the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce’s “Power of Place” motto, with the emblem of the Forest Service affirming the proclamation “Jackson Hole and the greater Teton area’s power can expressed in terms of our ECONOMY, COMMUNITY, and ENVIRONMENT.” Hmm, in that order?
In conjunction with the site, the Forest Service is hosting a daylong “real estate industry forum” on March 17. This St. Patrick’s Day event will be a different sort of celebration o’ the green, with the cash-strapped agency huddling with developers on how best to split up a pot o’ gold.
More likely for the public, it’s a fruitless chase for the end of the rainbow.
This whole process has been a sham since it was first exposed in late 2007. Most of what we know has come to light through the work of investigative journalists, particularly Joe Albright and Todd Wilkinson.
Pressure for the sale has come from the Forest Service’s regional office in Ogden, Utah, and ultimately Washington, D.C. As one Forest Service insider confided last night, although there has been a change of administration, it will take a long time to undo the damage of the last eight years.
The sale process was set in motion by a proposal to build an IMAX theater.
The guise the Forest Service has been using to push through the sale is providing more housing, but I’m told that employees are worried about losing the units on site and winding up with less housing in the end. Staff here in Jackson have greeted the proposal with skepticism.
Then there’s the issue of selling public land as the economy has tanked, when the public will receive less value for it. Jackson Gateway North’s market overview makes this modest concession: “there is currently a trend of stabilization of real estate values.” Ha!
Earlier, the Forest Service considered selling all the land on North Cache and moving the supervisor’s office to Lincoln or Sublette counties, which triggered the loudest uproar. The agency has backed down from that stance.
Apparently satisfied at winning one battle, several community leaders, among others, have since told me I need to be more realistic in appraising the situation.
Well, if we cave on this, I’m curious just how far we’ll erode our ideals in the coming years to fund our bankrupt government and resuscitate the economy.
A cautionary example can be found in Las Vegas, where the BLM has generated nearly $3 billion since 1998 by selling lands to developers. The agency has become so dependent on these sales for revenue that it has begun accepting bids for lower than appraised values.
As Brian Schweitzer, the fearless Montana governor, said of Bush administration plans to sell off public lands in 2006: “If we sold off a piece of land every time we needed to raise money, we wouldn’t have any public land left. Maybe just the parking lot in front of the Capitol building.”
———————————————
• Forest Service staying put, for now (March 20, 2008)
• a pathetic plot (Feb. 8, 2008)
• Forest Service on the big screen (Feb. 7, 2008)
• for sale: public lands agency, closed auction (Nov. 29, 2007)
Posted under Economy, Environment, Politics
We’ve seen a few bad real estate brochures over the last couple of years, but that one deserves some sort of award. I hope we can send a few readers your way. There’s no way this should go forward without intense scrutiny and debate.
So our insolvent federal government has to sell off some assets to fund its operations? I don’t see the problem. Perhaps you’d rather have them cut federal expenditures by 75% and start paying off the debt? Or are you one of those people that thinks we can just keep borrowing money until the bankruptcy becomes official?
Just curious. Which one is it?
AZ_Cowboy,
Where will you ride your horses when there’s no public land left? (unless your one of the rich bigwigs buying the land from the govt and putting up no trespassing signs)
Regardless of the debt our federal government is in, these lands are OUR lands and once there sold off, there’s no buying them back. I understand your point about the current state of our federal debt, but selling off OUR public lands is not the solution. They already lease a considerable amount of OUR lands to resource extraction at almost no benefit to US. If the govt needs more money, they should raise the cost of the leases instead of just basically giving them away.
It would probably be a pay to park lot in front of the Capital.
The parking lot in front of the Capital has been sold years ago… to the Lobbyist.
One need only look to the Boyle’s Hill sale of 40 acres of state land in 1990 for $5 million to see how ridiculous these public land sales look a very short time later. This one being even worse, given that it’s forest service land and that they propose putting housing on another, undisturbed location more critical for wildlife in east Jackson, while selling off one that makes perfect sense for housing.
This is disturbing. I hope the community is aware of this. In the paper this week?