ABQJOURNAL NORTH: Rep. Questions Land Trade http://www.abqjournal.com/cgi-bin/print_it.pl?page=/north/1523325187...

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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

By Phil Parker
Journal Staff Writer

State Rep. Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, has asked both the state auditor and the state
attorney general to look into whether a proposed private-for-public land trade in the
White Peak area north of Ocate was properly studied by the Land Office before the
swap was arranged.

Egolf said he wants to know whether the deal follows the strict letter of New Mexico
law and whether State Land Commissioner Patrick Lyons might have been influenced
into making the deal by “unreported gifts.”

“I think this whole deal is really weird,” Egolf said Monday of the complicated swap
involving four northeast New Mexico landowners. Lyons is proposing to give the
landowners about 11,000 acres of state trust land around White Peak and elsewhere in
the state in exchange for about 9,700 acres of private land.

The swap has been a hot-button issue with area sportsmen for months. They contend
the state is giving up prime big-game habitat for flat grazing turf. Lyons maintains the
swap is fair in terms of dollar value and also will consolidate the checkerboard of private
and public holdings in the White Peak area into much more manageable units, helping to
put an end to long-standing trespassing and poaching problems.

Egolf said he is concerned about the fairness of the trade, primarily whether the Land
Office is overstepping its authority.

“(The State Land Commissioner's) only job is to manage the land to generate more
money for the beneficiaries,” said Egolf. “If a checkerboard area makes it hard for law
enforcement to work, that may be true, but it's not an issue for the land commissioner.”

Brian Henington, the Land Office's project manager on the deal, said the Land Office
is tasked with generating money from the area for schools, but also needs to deal with
the issues Egolf asserts should be the province of law enforcement.

“We have constitutional authority to manage that land so it generates money,”

Henington said. “Trespassing comes into that.”

State trust lands were established in 1910 to generate revenue for schools and other
public purposes. Trust lands are also often leased for grazing or energy production.
Unlike with federal public lands, however, users of state trust land for recreational
purposes must buy a permit.

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Henington said he did not believe there had been a study that specifically addresses
how the trade would affect revenue generation from the trust lands in the White Peak
area. But he said White Peak has never been a big revenue producer for the Land Office,
unlike other trust lands where gas or oil drilling occur.

Egolf noted that the Department of Game and Fish has paid the Land Office $200,000
annually for an easement for public access to White Peak-area state trust lands, and that
if the trade goes through, that money will be lost to the land office and its beneficiaries.

“Game and Fish is not going to pay the easement after the trade,” Egolf said. “That's a
$200,000 loss.”

A spokesperson for the Game and Fish Department said it wasn't clear whether the
department would continue to pay for the easement while the deal is being worked out.

Egolf also contends the swap might not technically be legal under the Enabling Act for
New Mexico, which dates back to the state's founding. “When we became a state,
Congress specifically set aside these lands for the benefit of the schools,” he said. “Land
swaps were not part of the Enabling Act. Years later they changed the law to authorize
land swaps, but only if the Legislature authorized it. We never did.”

He also questioned why private ranchers paid for the appraisal of lands involved in the
swap when they obviously had a high stake in its findings.

“It's crazy that ranchers paid,” he said.

Henington said there was no conflict of interest involved because the Land Office
selected the appraiser with no input from landowners who paid for the study. According
to the appraisal, even though the Land Office will end up with less public land than it is
giving away, the swap is equitable in terms of value.

The Attorney General's Office spokesman Phil Sisneros said the office is reviewing
details of the proposed swap.

The Land Office has already opened bids for two of the four parts to the swap and
says it plans to finalize the first of those shortly. In each case, only one bidder — the
landowner with whom the Land Office has been negotiating — submitted a bid for the
state trust lands offered.

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