Say Anything Blog

And the people who actually own that property?  Who weren’t even told it was happening to them?

Well, they’re out of luck.

“I really feel like they didn’t want us to know about it,” landowner Ramona Sailer said. “I think this whole thing was railroaded through… The private landowner really should have more say.”

Sailer and her daughter own land in Mercer County which is included in the National Heritage Area. They knew nothing about this designation until after President Obama signed it into law this past March.

“This is the biggest regulatory taking in the history of North Dakota,” ND Farm Bureau board member Wes Klein said. “Theodore Roosevelt National Park is only 70,000 acres. This bill took half a million acres of private property from Huff Hills to the north end of the Knife River Indian Village and handed it over to a public foundation (the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation). It gave them the right to write a management plan for private property.”

A National Heritage Area (NHA) is designated by Congress and defined as a place where natural, cultural, historic, and recreational resources combine to form a cohesive, nationally distinctive landscape arising from patterns of human activity shaped by geography.

“To me, that states that every square inch of the United States could be part of a National Heritage Area,” ND Farm Bureau spokesman Steve Finsaas said. “At some point in time, everyplace has been shaped by a pattern of human activity under one of these classifications.”

Currently, there are 49 total NHAs throughout the United States. The Northern Plains Heritage Area in North Dakota is part of the newest batch created by the Omnibus Land Management Act of 2009. It encompasses 800 square miles in five counties – Burleigh, McLean, Mercer, Morton and Oliver.

So what happens if your property is caught up in this land grab?  You go from being an autonomous private property owner to one being regulated by an unelected public board.  Meaning that if the board decides you should do something with your land, or if you shouldn’t do something, you have to listen.  And you don’t get a vote.

“The legislation itself does not create adverse impacts to what you can do with your private property,” Finsaas said. “It does not create regulation. It’s the management plans that are written up, that’s what imposes the regulations. They (the NPHF board) have a perceived historical vision of what they want this area to look like and that’s what they want the landowners to comply with.”

The NPHF Board is led by Sen. Tracy Potter of Bismarck. The board was initially formed in 2005 and its membership has remained unchanged since 2007. Only one person on the nine-member board resides outside of the Bismarck-Mandan metro area, which is a big concern of rural property owners who stand to be affected the most by the board’s decisions.

This is an unconscionable trampling of property rights.  If the government wants to manage a piece of land then it should buy that land from the land owner and manage it, meeting the legal obligations and providing the appropriate compensations as laid out in the constitution.  But the government just giving itself management rights over land a private citizen owns is just plain wrong.

If you live in North Dakota, click here to let Senator Dorgan know what you think of the federal law (which he introduced into Congress) allowing this to happen.  An email to your state legislators as well, urging them to urge Senator Potter to respect property rights, would be a step in the right direction as well.