Letter: The Senate’s public land sell-off
A Senate amendment buried in the latest budget reconciliation bill threatens to sell off vast tracts of our public lands — including throughout Colorado — under the banner of affordable housing and energy development.
Let’s get real: this isn’t about helping working families or building energy infrastructure. These lands are some of the most remote, rugged, and infrastructure-free terrain in the West. We know them. We camp, hunt, hike, and raise our kids in these wild spaces. They are our backyard.
Now they’re being eyed for private sale, with no real plan, no feasibility studies, and no proof of actual energy potential. If there are serious intentions to develop energy on these parcels, where’s the data? Where’s the assessment? Using history as our greatest guidance, we remember Exxon’s Black Sunday in 1982, when oil-shale dreams evaporated overnight, leaving the region in economic ruin. Companies come and go. The land and the communities surrounding it are left holding the bag.
Building anything on these remote parcels — homes or drill pads — means hauling in water, power, roads, cell towers, and fire protection. Who’s paying for that? Because it sure won’t be the out-of-state investors who scoop up this land at auction.
This bill is dressed up as progress, but it walks and talks like a public land grab. Once they’re sold, they’re gone—no trespassing signs go up, and our shared landscape becomes private property. And the character of our region—what makes the wilderness what it is—changes forever.
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I’m not against housing or energy independence. But this plan is reckless, rushed, and wrong for our communities. “This land is my land, this land is your land.”
Let’s make sure our elected officials hear that loud and clear.
Alicia Gresley
Rifle
