Say Anything Blog

They’re not whiners, like the Fargo Forum called them, at least according to the Tribune which criticizes the manner in which this federal land designation was brought about if not the goal of that designation itself.

Landowners have every right to be concerned when the federal government wants to include them in a special heritage area. They are going to have questions, and they are going to need answers. In that give-and-take conversation, those landowners may support or oppose a project. But without that conversation, the seeds of discontent are sown.

Even if it’s a good thing.

The Missouri River Valley in McLean, Mercer, Oliver, Morton and Burleigh counties will make up a new federal Northern Plains Heritage Area. Its purpose is to enhance tourism and develop cultural heritage resourses and agricultural history sites. It’s to be a vehicle for federal grants. The NPHA cannot own property, nor will it regulate zoning or land use.

But some landowners are upset, to the point of opting out of the NPHA. They believe that efforts by Tracy Potter, executive director of the Fort Abraham Lincoln Foundation, which along with the Fort Mandan Lewis and Clark Foundation requested the designation, fell short of the required public involvement necessary for the designation.

It keeps being repeated over and over again that the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation will have no regulatory control over the 4.7 million acres of land caught up in this federal designation, but yet before the NPHF can get any of the $10 million in funding Congress has appropriated they must develop, in state Senator Tracy Potter’s own words, a “management plan.”  And once that is developed the group will have $10 million of our tax dollars over 15 years to push that management plan onto the property owners through the endless lobbying of county, municipal and township governments.

If you don’t think that’s a threat to property rights you’re kidding yourself.  What’s more, it’s already a threat.  According to North Dakota Farm Bureau director Wes Klein a land owner in the NHA, in the area of the Knife River Indian Village, has already lost a coal lease because of this nonsense.  And in other states people who own homes and property within federal NHA designations have had to fight the unelected boards which are tasked with managing to do things like remodel their homes.

Tracy Potter, in an indignant letter to the Grand Forks Herald accusing his detractors on this issue of lying, suggests that his group and the federal money/4.7 million acre land designation they got from Congress will merely be used to remodel interpreative centers and put up new signs at historical sites.  If that’s true, why did they need the land designation?  Why are they developing a management plan for that land?

Congress could appropriate money for new signs and interpretative centers without a 4.7 million acre land designation.  They could do it without tasking some unelected board of political activists with developing a management plan for the land.  There are other motivations and goals in mind than what people like Potter are letting on, and they’ve managed to get $10 million in our tax dollars and the permission of Congress to pursue them without so much as asking the land owners involved if they’d, you know, actually like to be involved.

On a related note, the Tribune seems to think that the goals of this land grab are a-ok because it means more federal money coming into the state.  I’d like to remind the editorial board at the Tribune that our federal government is bankrupt.  We have a nearly $2 trillion federal deficit this year.  And North Dakotans, no matter how much federal money the state gets back, have to pay federal taxes as well.

I’m sure at some point in the future the Tribune will write an editorial or two about the national deficit, condemning it as bad.  I’d like them to keep in mind their championing of federal spending in North Dakota as they do it and ask themselves how they think they can have it both ways.