Meet the Pro-Bundy Nevada Official Who Wants to Transfer Land Control to the State and Calls the Feds’ Action ‘Unprecedented’
Apr. 13, 2014 7:00pm Becket Adams
•Elko County, Nev., Commissioner Demar Dahl said that the land in dispute in the case of rancher Cliven Bundy does belong to the federal government.
•However, he’s part of a state-sanctioned task force charged with bringing public land under state control.
•He believes the government’s response to the dispute has been “unprecedented.”
•The man who says he’s a friend of Bundy’s also added that the rancher did try to pay the county his grazing fees instead of the federal government.
•“I don’t know why he hasn’t mentioned this more often.”
A Nevada county commissioner whose fighting to find a way to bring public land under state control said Sunday that the land involved in a dispute between rancher Cliven Bundy, 67, and federal agencies does indeed belong to the U.S. government, but he said he supports the veteran rancher in his opposition to government overreach.
He also thinks the government’s response has been excessive.
“The land that he’s talking about, that he has been using, that’s land that belongs to the federal government,” Elko County Commissioner and rancher Demar Dahl — who added he’s a personal friend of Bundy — said on Sunday during a phone interview with TheBlaze.
“That’s been part of what this fight is about.”
Along with being a rancher and an extremely active member of his community, Dahl chairs the Nevada Land Management Task Force, a group formed in 2013 by the state legislature and charged with developing a legal means to transfer control of public lands from the federal government to the state.
“That’s part of what we do,” Dahl said. “We have been working to develop a process to bring control of those lands to the state. So [Bundy] is on government land, but we want to find a process to have those lands controlled by the state.”
The task force consists of 17 members, each from a different county in Nevada. The group has already held four meetings to discuss plans to transfer control of the public lands to the state. The task force has eight more meetings scheduled for this year and hopes to present its plan for the transfer to the Legislative Committee on Public Lands by September 1, 2014.
“We’re looking for ways to afford this and see if we can manage it,” he added. “Once we transfer the control, nothing would change about the land. It’ll still be public. People can still use them; they can still visit them.”
The land being fought over by Bundy and federal agents, some 600,000 acres in Gold Butte, Nev., belongs to the U.S. government, according to a 2013 U.S. District Court ruling.
“[T]he public lands in Nevada are the property of the United States because the United States has held title to those public lands since 1848, when Mexico ceded the land to the United States,” the court said, adding that the federal government lawfully acquired ownership of the land under the Treaty of the Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Claims that local ranchers should have more rights to the public land, Dahl said, is why the state formed the Nevada Land Management Task Force. The group aims to offer what the federal government offers, but at a local level that better understands the needs and concerns of Nevada’s ranchers.
Meet the Pro-Bundy Nevada Official Who Wants to Transfer Land Control to the State and Calls the Feds’ Action ‘Unprecedented’