Whose Land Is It?

This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land….”

(music comes to screeching halt)

The BLM allows ranchers to have their livestock trample all over forests and deserts, disturbing sensitive ground (just walk around those forests and deserts of Utah, and you will see….).
Yet when someone is living on a small parcel of what the BLM deems is “its land”, officials within the BLM determine that residential living is not appropriate for the ground.

This makes absolutely no sense.

In the Salt Lake Tribune’s article, Son inherits BLM scrape, there is an account of a man and his family living on his family’s land (inherited from his great-great grandfather), on a small parcel of it that was set up in 1976 based on a fence line between the property and the “BLM” land. (which is actually the land of all of us).

The BLM is not only now evicting the young family but is requiring them to pay an archaelogical fee to record American Indian sites on the property and to repair the impact on sensitive ground.

The Tribune lists this time table at the end of the article:

Squatter Squabble Timeline
* Gary Haws sets a double-wide mobile home on land he thinks is his in 1976.
* A survey in 1984 discovers the home and other improvements sit partly on 2.5 acres of BLM land and adjacent to 90 acres Haws owns.
* The BLM determines by 1985 that the 2.5 acres can be sold, provided Haws pays an archaeologist to record American Indian sites on the property.
* Land-sale negotiations cease in 1987 after the National Wildlife Federation sues in an unrelated case, stalling all BLM land sales.
* The government allows Haws to stay on the land under temporary permit for nine years at $150 a year. He pays for all but three of those years.
* Negotiations resume in 1996 to resolve the dispute, but officials find Haws failed to perform the required mitigation.
* The government files a trespass complaint against Haws in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City. Haws is given two options: Buy the land for about $21,000 or remove the mobile home and restore the property.
* By February 2000, Haws’ lawyer cannot get his client to negotiate, so he bows out.
* U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart in November 2000 orders Haws and his structures off the property and requires that he restore the land.
* On Oct. 20, 2006, Stewart orders the U.S. Marshals Service and BLM law-enforcement officers to remove Haws and the structures within 45 days. The government later learns that Haws’ son has bought the mobile home and explores whether to begin negotiating a possible land sale with him.