30 Apr 2014
Every month, Raymond Yowell, the 84-year-old former chief of the Shoshone Indian Tribe in northeastern Nevada, has almost $200 garnished from his $1,150 Social Security check, and it all dates back to a 5:00am phone call on a Friday morning in 2002.
That morning, a government official from
the Bureau of Land Management told him to come down to a seizure site
where the 132 cattle he owned were about to be impounded.
When he arrived, men brandishing handguns
told him he couldn't get any closer than 250 yards from his cattle. He
watched from a distance as the government loaded the livestock onto
stock trailers.
Within a week, the cattle had been sold
at a private auction – for what Yowell estimated to be a quarter of
their market price. The proceeds belonged to BLM, officials told him,
paying a portion of the grazing fees he suddenly owed. It wasn't enough
to cover the full debt, and BLM sent Yowell a bill for $180,000.
Yowell has been fighting the BLM in court
ever since, but while the case moves its way through the system, his
Social Security check takes a hit every month.
The story, ranchers in Nevada say, is far
from unique. Beginning in the late 1980s, BLM adopted aggressive
tactics in the West, leading to large-scale cattle seizures and a
disruption of life for ranchers that had utilized public lands for
decades prior.
While the press has showered attention on
Cliven Bundy, a polarizing man who prompted a tense standoff between
Bundy's well-armed militia supporters and federal police, the struggle
between ranchers and the BLM is much broader.
In 1994, Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce
Babbitt rushed through a total overhaul of cattle and sheep grazing
regulations on over 260 million acres of land that was managed by the
BLM and Agriculture Department's U.S. Forest Service, The Washington Post reported.
The 1994 “Rangeland Reform”
regulations included doubling the current fees charged to ranchers for
public forage and further environmental rules to prevent “overgrazing.”
Opponents noted that in the runup to the new regulations, the National
Academy of Scientists – a preeminent scientific authority on which
federal agencies rely for expert analysis – had issued a report
concluding so little was known about the condition of U.S. range lands
that the new standards were essentially a shot in the dark. But Babbit
forged ahead anyway.
At the time, former-Sen. Pete Domenici
ripped the plan, a version of which he had defeated in Congress when it
was a legislative proposal the year before. "The last thing we should do
is hurry decisions that have far-reaching effects on western states,"
he said.
Underlying the move to raise fees was
BLM's view that the fees on public lands were too low – much lower than
fees to graze on private land, for example.
But as Heather Smith Thomas, an Idaho rancher, noted in a 1994 article in Rangelands,
a peer-reviewed academic journal, the private grazing fees were
artificially high because the government owns so much land in the West.
“What many people do not understand is
that the ‘low’ fee is just one small portion of the rancher's many costs
in using public land. The total costs amount to much more than renting
private pasture, yet the rancher is locked into this situation, totally
dependent on the public range. He can't just walk away if the fee gets
too high, and rent pasture elsewhere; there is not sufficient private
pasture available,” Thomas wrote.
The new fees imposed upon ranchers in the
90’s were skewed, according to Thomas, because the fee was based on
private land lease rates, but private lease rates were high due to the
scarce availability of private land and the lack of regulations on
private land compared to federally owned land.
Thomas noted the“BLM states that "land
treatment solely oriented toward meeting livestock forage requirements
will be discontinued". Additionally the reforms have less emphasis on
grazing, “yet the BLM wants to charge the rancher more for something
that is being made much more difficult to use.”
Before the Babbit rule, fees were based on a formula that reflected annual changes in the costs of production.
“All the legislative history involving FS
and BLM fees show that grazing fees were intended to be based on the
rancher's ability to pay, not on some arbitrary value of forage or
budget needs of the administrative bureau,” Thomas said of the 1978
legislation.
Ranchers found themselves in court for years fighting the BLM immediately following 1994 regulations.
Idaho Republican Congresswoman Helen
Chenoweth-Hage and her husband Wayne Hage, lost their grazing permit on
their Nevada ranch property for federal lands in 1991, when the federal
government refused to renew it. This incident started a 20-year battle
with the BLM. The government also denied access to the Hage family’s
water rights, which pre-dated the implementation of the 1934 Taylor
Act’s grazing permit requirement, by not allowing access to streams and
wells. Eventually, the agency built fences around any water source, so
the cattle could not drink. The BLM seized Hage’s cattle and filed a
civil trespass action against Hage.
A little over twenty years later,
however, seven years after Hage and his wife died, Hage’s children,
Wayne Jr. and Ramona Morrison Hage won a victory for the family in
court.
Last May, U.S. District Court Judge Robert C. Jones ruled
that “the government and the agents of the government in that locale,
sometime in the ’70s and ’80s, entered into a conspiracy, a literal,
intentional conspiracy, to deprive the Hages of not only their permit
grazing rights, for whatever reason, but also to deprive them of their
vested property rights under the takings clause, and I find that that’s a
sufficient basis to hold that there is irreparable harm if I don’t …
restrain the government from continuing in that conduct.”
Judge Jones found
the government’s demand for trespass fines and damages from innocent
ranchers to be “abhorrent to the Court and I express on the record my
offense of my own conscience in that conduct.
That’s not just simply
following the law and pursuing your management right, it evidences an
actual intent to destroy their water rights, to get them off the public
lands.”
Jones went further and accused federal
government personnel of racketeering under the federal RICO (Racketeer
Influenced and Corruption Organizations) statute, and accused them of
extortion, mail fraud, and fraud, in an attempt “to kill the business of
Mr. Hage.”
Morrison Hage, a member of the Nevada
Agriculture Board, told Breitbart News that “In the west our governors
almost conduct themselves as if they’re a colonial governor and as if
they’re only governor over the private land, adding “They take their
hands off the steering wheel even though all state power emerge from the
state. They take their hands off the steering whenever there’s anything
to do with federal land management.”
Harvey Frank Robbins became a Wyoming
dude ranch owner in 1994, after buying a piece of land in the state, but
Robbins troubles began soon after his purchase. He told Live Stock Weekly,
"The government — the Forest Service, the BLM and the Wyoming Game and
Fish Department — were trying to buy the ranch," he explains. "They had
these plans of grandeur of having this sanctuary of elk and trout
fishing and all the things they could do. Then this guy from Alabama
comes in at the last minute, not knowing any of this, and buys this
ranch."
Robbins accused BLM employees of trying
to force him to renew an easement to the point of almost putting him out
of business. When Robbins refused to do so, according
to his lawyer, Karen Budd Falen, BLM employees broke into his house and
demanded to be allowed on to his property without a court order, among
other things. While Robbins won victories in lower courts, a RICO case
against the BLM employees eventually went before the Supreme Court in
2006, where the majority ruled the BLM agents were not liable for the
alleged actions against Robbins.
Justice David Souter wrote opinion for
the majority, stating, “Souter wrote that "we think [that] any damages
remedy for actions by Government employees who push too hard for the
Government's benefit may come better, if at all, through legislation."
Legislative changes could very well
happen in the near future. New legislation to reform how much land the
government does own could be headed to Capitol Hill. The meeting of
western lawmakers in Utah last week signaled such a plan. Additionally,
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced the Lone State’s plan to
defend its own land from BLM seizures.
