CJ Day
Staff Writer
The Wyoming legislature has announced plans to purchase over a million acres of land across the southwestern portion of the state, in what some call the largest land purchase by the government since the purchase of Alaska.
Lawmakers and the Wyoming business community largely support the maneuver, but the deal’s opponents argue it will deplete the state’s already strapped cash reserves.
“I think that if they can make it work, it’s probably a good thing,” said Daniel Alvarez, a graduate student who focuses on public lands advocacy. “It’s better to have the state own this land than to give it over to some corporation.”
The state plans to purchase the property from oil company Occidental Petroleum, along with an additional four million acres of mineral rights across the western United States.
The price of the land is still unclear. Representative Chuck Gray (R-Natrona) said in a recent legislative session that the legislature expects to pay anywhere from $400 million to $2 billion for the land, finding a $1.6 billion variance between estimates.
Many of the deal’s opponents argue that Wyoming’s budget cannot stretch to fit the land unless legislators pursue unorthodox methods for raising revenue. The state has $1.1 billion earmarked for education investment that it plans to use for the purchase, but if the deal ends up costing more than that, the legislature will need to find additional sources of funding.
“It’s like spending all your savings on a new car when you’re struggling to pay rent,” said Sierra Madsen, a senior majoring in economics. “Yeah, it’s probably a good investment, but it’s not a good time to be spending all this cash.”
Proponents of the deal, including Governor Mark Gordon, have argued the deal will come to pay for itself and more in time. The land sits on top of valuable deposits of oil and natural gas, and other minerals like trona, and the state plans to lease out the land for mining and drilling if the deal goes through.
Madsen is not convinced the land is as valuable as Gordon proposed.
“These oil companies, they aren’t going to sell this land unless they think it’s played out,” she said. “It’s basic economics. No one sells land that they think they can still turn a profit on, and real estate only gets more valuable.”
While real estate is an inherently safe and stable investment, Madsen said she feels it is likely the land is worth considerably less than Occidental is asking for it.
“It’s pretty common: you sell off land that isn’t worth anything anymore to some guy who thinks he’s getting a deal, and you walk away a billion dollars richer than if you had just held on to the land,” she said.
Environmentalists are largely split on the deal. Some have argued the swap in land ownership could disrupt the migration patterns of animals in the area, depending on what Wyoming ends up doing with the land, and others said they fear the state could use harmful extractive strategies like pit mines to get at the land’s mineral wealth.
“On the whole, it’s probably better that the state owns the land, from a conservation perspective,” said Alvarez. “It’s a million acres, it doesn’t matter how much the state wants to do, they’re not going to be able to use all the land. A lot of it is just going to sit until they maybe put an oil derrick on it in thirty years.”
The state legislature will continue to debate the pros and cons of the deal, and they will likely reach a consensus on what to do by the end of the current legislative session. Gordon has called for a special legislative session this summer to close the deal, and the real shape of the deal will not be finalized until then. The government has until the end of the year to make up their minds, or Occidental will move on to the next buyer.
