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There's a multi-millionaire named Mel Simon whose money comes from shopping centers. He lives in Florida where he contributes money to Democratic candidates.
But he's not in Florida all year; he also has a palace near Aspen. The Aspen mansion sits next to public lands -- that is, land owned by the people of the United States.
Simon needed to cross this public land to reach his estate, and the Bureau of Land Management granted him a right of way for his driveway.
But millionaires, especially millionaires from Florida, are apparently too precious to bend their backs with a snow shovel, and perhaps too fearful of potential youth-gang members to hire a neighborhood kid to shovel the driveway.
And so, he got permission to install heating coils under his driveway to melt the snow so that it wouldn't have to be shoveled.
He's not the only one who does this, of course; I recall a resident friend showing me around Vail one February afternoon, pointing out the heated driveways.
It seems peculiar that people would move to places known for their snow, such as Aspen and Vail, and then go to such lengths to remove the stuff that presumably attracted them.
That driveway heat must come from somewhere -- a nuclear power plant, perhaps, or the burning of imported oil, or maybe a coal-fired plant that produces acid rain as a byproduct.
And so, we grapple with radioactive waste, send young people to die in the Persian Gulf, or poison our lakes and streams -- all so that rich people don't have to shovel their sidewalks. Talk about social benefits from environmental degradation.
You'd think that our federal government, so solicitous about related matters that it closely regulates auto fuel economy and the size of toilet tanks, could ban heated driveways -- especially on federal land.
But it isn't the driveway that's at issue here. Simon added a swimming pool to the manor, and it crosses the property line to encroach on public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management.
This has become a federal case. Simon's senator, Bob Graham of Florida, encouraged the BLM to negotiate a settlement with Simon. Meanwhile Wayne Allard, a Colorado senator, has urged the BLM to crack down on Simon, and it's not clear why.
If a rancher had placed an unauthorized stock-watering
tank on a BLM grazing allotment, and the agency had cracked
down on the rancher, we'd probably hear Allard denouncing a
remote and callous pointy-headed federal bureaucracy
engaged in some War on the West.
But since Simon contributed to the wrong party's political campaigns, Allard emerges as a great defender of public lands, and I hope he remembers that the next time he's in front of People for the West or some similar gathering of Sagebrush Rebels who want the public lands turned over to the states or sold to private owners.
How should this be resolved?
History might help here. We can start with the United States acquiring land by treaty or military conquest. The land was opened for settlement and development via pre-emption, sale, homesteading, railroad grant, mining claims, etc.
At the turn of the century, much of what remained was
withdrawn into forest reserves
that became the
current National Forests. Most of the leftovers ended up
under the BLM, which was established 50 years ago to manage
that land until the government could find some way to get
rid of it.
Since then, the BLM's formal mission has changed, but a return to the original goal makes sense now, since it could solve social problems in the West.
Resort areas like Aspen, amid thousands of acres of BLM land, suffer from housing shortages, partly because there isn't much private land to build on. Open the BLM land, and suddenly there's room to build.
Mountain estates often command premium prices because they're surrounded by public land. Under current policies, that's a federal guarantee that you'll never have neighbors, let alone neighbors of the wrong color or economic class.
But open up that BLM land -- homesteading, perhaps, or a
lottery, or as a veteran's benefit -- and not only could
people of normal means live near their work, but the
exclusivity premium
enjoyed by the upper crust would
vanish. They'd either have to learn to live with diverse
neighbors, or move to Gstaad or St. Croix, and in either
case, we'd be better off.
So the solution looks simple here. Sell Simon the land for his pool at a fair market price. But use the rest of the public land around his place for a trailer park. I like public land and open space as much as the next guy, but we all have to make sacrifices sometimes.
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