Like a big Monopoly game where
taxpayers are the tokens, the federal land exchange
process grows tense this election season. One
Monopoly player is trying to hold on to his White House
by trading properties he may not even own. "Give you Vegas for just about
anything," seems to be President Bill Clinton's
pitch. Remember the "deal" that
he told the Democratic National Convention he'd made to
"save Yellowstone" from mining? What Clinton and his environmental
advisors had in mind is still not clear. It was first reported as the swap of
some unidentified federal land worth at least $65 million
to Crown Butte Mines Inc. for their promising gold strike
just outside Yellowstone in Montana. But it now appears
that Clinton may not have had any particular properties
at all in mind when -- during a vacation visit to
Yellowstone in August -- he made his electioneering
announcement. In fact, it turns out a federal
search team from the Bureau of Land Management wasn't
even organized to look for possible swap sites until 17
days after the announcement. That's the word from
BLM Deputy Director Matt Millenbach. And fudged out of Clinton's campaign
crowing on the deal was the fact that it gives the mining
company the option of backing out of the deal in February
-- a month of so after the Clintons have the carpets
redone for another four years in the White House. Just how Clinton was even able to
pull off the deal, and what promises may have been made,
seems part of the mystery. Four of the mining company's
board members resigned shortly after the announcement,
complaining they were never even informed negotiations
were going on. So what does the President have to
offer in return for a campaign plank built in the Wyoming
breeze? The usual, it appears: richly
sought-after and often-claimed development sites around
Las Vegas identified by Millenbach as up for trade. This is apparently the same slice of
BLM-owned land near the booming gaming capitol that has
already been claimed in part by the Del Webb Corporation
in return for farms it and the Nature Conservancy bought
this year from embattled growers near a proposed wetland
outside Fallon, Nevada. It's also apparently the same Las
Vegas BLM property the American Land Conservancy refers
to in its still on-going swap deal for a 140-acre mansion
and estate on Lake Tahoe. And although the President was just
as vague in Arizona about what he had done in Utah, the
federally-owned Vegas property also seems to have been
part of the carrot offered to trade out coal leases on
his newly-proclaimed Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument. Vegas, like Boardwalk and Park
Place, seems to command a lot of interest, even if there
may not actually be enough of it to go around. What seems obvious was that
Clinton's western land dealings were meant primarily to
win him back Pennsylvania Avenue, while promising to pay
the bank later. Just as they had in Wyoming when
Clinton supposedly shut down the min in Montana,
environmentalists cheered their man's announcement of a
1.7 million acre Utah wilderness created without so much
as a howdy to Congress. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt,
there for the occasion in his home state, bubbled on
about there being "other mineral lands in Utah, a
lot of federal lands, a lot of federal mineral
lands," to trade. "All we've got to do is
identify them and get that discussion going," he
said. Utah Senator Orrin hatch stood with
his state's entire Congressional delegation in calling it
part of a "war on the West," and Utah Governor
Michael Leavitt accused Clinton of completely ignoring
"the public trust." But both those guys are Republicans,
and Utah only has five electoral votes anyway. Clinton's
ambitions were clearly farther west, mostly in
California. The Golden State had its own plans
for dealing around public property in an environmentalist
push to trade 3000 acres of privately held redwood forest
for the surplus U.S. Naval base at Treasure Island, an
offer that sent chills up the backs of even some tree
huggers in San Francisco. 
That deal was apparently put aside
by a brokered arrangement to buy the forest lands with
federal and state funds totaling $380 million.
Environmentalists said they still didn't like it. Closed military bases such as
Treasure Island and even old government office buildings
in Washington, D.C., are part of the cards Clinton and
the BLM apparently hold in their western wheeling and
dealing. But somebody, apparently, has to be
bluffing in this strange property game. Mining officials
are still perplexed about what might be the final outcome
of the Yellowstone deal, which some federal officials
say, off the record, never had more than a 50-50 chance
of being final in the first place. The feds had tried to gloss over the
doubts with sweeping generalizations about their
knowledge of western lands, but Montana officials were
appalled when one BLM representative suggested the swap
could involve federal grazing lands. At going prices of about $100 an
acre, that would take about 650,000 acres to pay off the
mine. "We don't really want to give
up half the state of Montana," admitted BLM Deputy
Director Millenbach. So if the big deal of the Demo
convention is to be done before the back-out date in
February, that seems to leave Las Vegas, or something
like it, where empty-looking desert can be parlayed and
resold for many times what it's worth in public hands. Just such deals cut in recent years
for Nevada grazing and farm land made "public"
in a swap for property near Glitter Gulch have made
several developers and their "enviromentalist"
agents like The Nature Conservancy and the American Land
Conservancy wealthy. Critics have demanded that the BLM
exchange program be re-examined by Congress with an eye
on whether the sweetheart arrangements are actually
bilking taxpayers out of millions of dollars that the
lands are actually worth. The BLM turned aside one such
threatened Congressional inquiry earlier this year with a
combination of political pressure reportedly put on by
Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and a promise to re-examine its
own procedures. It's that re-examination that has
Harriet Burgess of the American Land Conservancy making
worried noises. "We're working on four
exchanges with them right now," she said, and added
that if new BLM procedures for exchanges aren't announced
early next year, it could jeopardize her plan to
"save" the $137 million Whittell estate on Lake
Tahoe for the Forest Service. Burgess has become a masterful land
trader over the last decade by fronting the ALC for
developers anxious to get their names on available
federal property by buying up private property and
deeding it over to public use. It's not as generous as it sounds --
the deals financially benefit both the developers and the
ALC. In Fallon, for example, Nature
Conservancy-brokered deals allowed Del Webb to buy out
farm land at hefty-sounding prices of up to a million
dollars. But the farm land is taken off the county tax
rolls and ceases all production, while the
"non-profit" Nature Conservancy not only earns
a fee, but takes some of the choice land itself, as a
wetlands "visitors center." The Vegas property
Del Webb expects to get for its end of the arrangement
has been estimated by a former BLM appraiser to be worth
as much as 10 times the price paid for the farm land. Nature Conservancy land swaps in the
Fallon farming region also appear to have put on hold
during the election season. Everybody, it seems -- the
Yellowstone miners, the Utah coal interests, Del Webb,
The Nature Conservancy, and Harriet Burgess among them --
appears to be waiting to see what will happen after the
election. Back on the campaign trail,
meanwhile, Bill Clinton was down in Florida talking about
efforts to save the Everglades. He has an idea, it was reported. If
he can just get those developers to sit down and talk
with him, there's this nice, big, patch of federal land
near Las Vegas...