Coburn, Dorgan Reach Agreement On National Heritage Areas

Those of you who have been following my National Heritage Area coverage (past posts here) know that Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn has been protecting the North Dakota property rights that Senator Byron Dorgan has been undermining by designating 4.7 million acres of mostly private land into a NHA that would be managed (with the help of millions of your federal tax dollars) by his good buddy Tracy Potter and his Northern Plains Heritage Foundation.
The land owners caught up in that designation a) weren’t (and still haven’t been) notified that their land had been designated and b) weren’t given the option to opt-out.
Senator Coburn wanted to change the law to make it so that land owners had to opt-in before their land could be considered part of any designation. Senator Dorgan has been fighting that, but apparently they’ve reached an agreement today on an amendment which makes the whole debacle a little bit less bad. Here’s a PDF of the amendment approved by Dorgan (and apparently Senator Conrad too per the hand-written notes), and here’s the key text:

Any owner of private property within an existing or new National Heritage Area may opt out of participating in any plan, project, program, or activity conducted within the National Heritage Area if the property owner provides written notice to the local coordinating entity.

That’s…an improvement. If this amendment passes with this language at least land owners will be able to opt out of a designation. But if they aren’t notified that their land has been designated, what good is giving them the opportunity to opt-out? Further, shouldn’t they be opted out by default and only choose to opt-in if and when they decide that a given NHA is something they want to participate in?
And going beyond that, even if they opt out remember that whatever private special interest group (in the instance of the North Dakota NHA state Senator Tracy Potter’s Northern Plains Heritage Foundation which features not one but two Sierra Club members) is put in charge of the NHA will have millions of dollars with which to lobby local governing entities for the sort of regulations and ordinances they want.
No land owner can opt out of those.
This bad situation is far from fixed, though Senator Coburn should be commended for his hard work on it. Word from his office today is that they’re going to keep fighting for a better solution. I think that Senators Conrad and Dorgan should be encouraged in the same direction by some of their constituents (contact them by clicking here).