Thursday, April 28, 2016

Full of It

As a former State Land Commissioner I can attest to the fact that our current Land Commissioner, GOP fundamentalist Aubrey Dunn, is full of it.  Dogma that is.  His dogma is that any protection of large swaths of watershed and natural places will cause school buses to explode.

He is now stating that a small piece of state land being enveloped within a proposed wilderness area in northern New Mexico will cause a reduction in revenues for the Permanent Fund.  What B.S.  The area is already designated as the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument.

That 1250 acres is providing maybe $1000 a year in grazing fees.  If there are any mineral properties under the land worth spit, they would have been developed long ago.  In my estimation that 1250 acres being protected as a small part of a larger area, will produce more revenue than anything else through added tourism.  Oh, and the cowboys can still run their cattle in there.  And the state will be able to swap out the land for other federal lands.

So Dunn is doing what rightwing republicans in the west normally do, they are screaming the sky is falling when it is not.  This Commissioner has the vision of a brick wall.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This Monument is a jewel and would create far more tourism than the money from land barons. It could become a mecca for mountain bikers, wildlife explorers and many more uses. Right now it's beyond spectacular and used mostly by locals and those who stumble upon it. The expansion to the Colorado boarder would protect our watershed, but we all know Dunn supports the other exploitation interests of the public land for private use.