From above the Portneuf Valley, a conservationist sees a continuing threat to public land access
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POCATELLO – The vast expanse of the Portneuf Valley stretched out below Greg McReynolds from his vantage point of over 2,000 feet up.
He was standing near the top of Chinese Peak, where vehicles driving along Interstate 15 look like nothing but dots. To his right, he could see all of Pocatello and Chubbuck. At this height, the cities’ trees were more visible than their roads. To his left, he could see where Bannock Highway leads out into a small section of the vast Caribou-Targhee National Forest. Even people living north of Chubbuck can access this part of the forest in under half an hour.
McReynolds, the executive director of a statewide conservation organization called Idaho Rivers United, is a hunter, angler and resident of Pocatello.
While looking down at the valley, McReynolds told EastIdahoNews.com, “I see a community that is completely connected to public lands. It’s just in everything we do, that direct connection and access.”
He said that access is under threat.
The latest proposal to ‘dispose’ of public lands
On June 11, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, proposed legislative text that would have amended the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), a massive budget reconciliation bill being considered in the Senate.
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If passed as proposed, it would have made more than 250 million acres (390,625 square miles) of public lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management eligible for “disposal.” In this context, disposal is the legal process of selling, exchanging or transferring public lands to other entities. These entities could be other federal agencies, state governments, or private landowners.
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As initially proposed, the amendment states that the land that would be disposed of through “competitive sale, auction, or other methods” and would be used to “address local housing needs (including housing supply and affordability) or any associated community needs.”
Lee signaled his intent to rework this proposal in a post on social media after the Senate parliamentarian found it to violate the chamber’s rules on Monday.
The parliamentarian has a nonpartisan advisory role that assists the chamber in interpreting rules and procedures. While the chamber can overrule the parliamentarian’s rulings, this is rare.
Deseret News reported on Tuesday that Lee was to present a revised proposal to the parliamentarian on Wednesday. EastIdahoNews.com has not obtained an official revision of the proposal yet.
However, Lee said in a post on Monday that he plans to remove all Forest Service land from the proposal and make only BLM land within five miles of “population centers” eligible for disposal.
Housing prices are crushing families and keeping young Americans from living where they grew up. We need to change that.
Thanks to YOU—the AMERICAN PEOPLE—here’s what I plan to do:
1. REMOVE ALL Forest Service land. We are NOT selling off our forests.
2. SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE…
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) June 24, 2025
How are land disposals conducted?
While Lee’s spokesperson did not return multiple requests for comment, Deputy State Director of Communications Serena Baker of the Idaho BLM described the well-established legal process of land disposal.
The BLM establishes resource management plans for specific areas that evaluate the impact community development or resource extraction could have on wildlife, air quality, and the ecosystem as a whole.
Baker said the BLM asks questions like, “How does everything interact with each other, and how does that impact the land, and how can we manage that land best to support our mission of multiple use and sustained yield?”
Baker said that gathering public input on potential land disposals is a legally required and important part of the process. There are opportunities to provide comment at multiple phases in the process. Before anything officially begins, Baker said they encourage applicants to gather community feedback.
The BLM relies on the public, especially those who spend time recreating on land that could be disposed of, to make their voice heard during this process.
“The public is our eyes and ears on the land, because public land is vast. We need everyone’s input who’s out there recreating and enjoying public lands to feed that information to us, because we can’t be everywhere. We need your eyes and ears to tell us,” Baker said.
While Baker doesn’t know exactly what the process would look like if a revised version of Lee’s amendment were to pass in the OBBBA, the BLM has already spent time looking through resource management plans to identify lands that would meet its criteria for disposal.
Lee’s original amendment laid out an order of priority for what lands would be disposed of if the legislation were to pass:
- (A) are nominated by States or units of local governments;
(B) are adjacent to existing developed areas;
(C) have access to existing infrastructure;
(D) are suitable for residential housing;
(E) reduce checkerboard land patterns; or
(F) are isolated tracts that are inefficient to manage.
Would the proposal bring affordable housing to Pocatello?
According to a quote from Lee in a committee news release, among other things, the proposal is aimed at “making housing more affordable for hardworking American families.”
Mark Dahlquist, executive director of Neighborworks Pocatello, a nonprofit organization that constructs affordable housing, said that there’s plenty of high-end housing available in the Gate City. Houses in the $400,000 to $500,000 range are more common, he said.
“There’s plenty of months’ worth of stock of that housing,” Dahlquist said.
Rather, Dahlquist said that Pocatello lacks housing that can be purchased affordably, saying, “We’re always in a shortage of the small-square-foot, affordable homes.”
Neighborworks Pocatello and other organizations like it can’t build affordable housing out of town for several reasons, one of them being the costs associated with bringing infrastructure like water services and sewer lines. Dahlquist would instead expect “higher-end” housing to be built on land like that.
“A key thing when we’re trying to build a house is that we have to have something that’s close to infrastructure,” Dahlquist said. “It’s really, really hard for an affordable housing developer to go somewhere way out there where there’s no infrastructure.”
Dahlquist said that if BLM land surrounding the city were to become available, his organization wouldn’t be interested in developing it.
“We wouldn’t even really entertain the idea,” Dahlquist said.
McReynolds doesn’t believe the fight is over
McReynolds took EastIdahoNews.com to the top of Chinese Peak on Monday afternoon, after bipartisan backlash to Lee’s proposal had already mounted.
Idaho Rivers United and over one hundred other nonprofit organizations signed a letter sent that day to governors of western States, urging them to oppose the proposal. But even before that, on Friday, Sens. Jim Risch and Mike Crapo, both R-Idaho, made statements in opposition to it.
RELATED | Idaho Sens. Risch and Crapo come out against public land-sale provision
Despite the ruling made by the parliamentarian on Tuesday, McReynolds isn’t ready to call it a win until “the budget passes with no public land sales in it.”
Lee’s original proposal would have mandated the disposal of at least 0.5% and up to 0.75% of Forest Service and BLM lands, which would be at least 2.1 million acres and up to 3.2 million acres of public lands. This is a small amount of public lands overall in the West, and Lee’s potential revised proposal would be even smaller.
But McReynolds stressed that not only would this still be a lot of acres to lose, it would also be “important” acres.
McReynolds pointed out that access points to public lands, especially the ones in the Portneuf Valley, are often within five miles of a city. He also pointed out how Lee’s original amendment listed isolated tracts of land as one of the considerations in identifying lands for disposal.
“If you sell off the access points that are adjacent to roads, rivers and trailheads, then you’re going to have more isolated parcels (of public lands),” McReynolds said. “So are they going to be back with another bill to sell off more isolated parcels?”
McReynolds used the Cusick Creek Trail as an example. Although the trailhead itself isn’t on BLM land, it immediately enters land managed by it.
“I guess we still own the parking lot, but the land adjacent to the parking lot would be private,” McReynolds said.
Baker emphasized that the BLM evaluates whether or not a land disposal is in the best interest of people using public lands.
“If a parcel of public land has been identified for disposal, when a party expresses interest, the BLM would once again look at all of the surrounding factors. We want to ensure than any land sale, exchange or transfer is in the interest of the American public. If a land sale blocks public access, then that would not be in the public’s interest,” Baker said in an emailed statement.
Baker also pointed out that the BLM does manage lands that don’t have public access points, “but they have, perhaps, other access through adjacent landowners.” But Baker also acknowledged that its up to the discretion of those landowners whether or not people can use their property to access public lands.
Although the future of Lee’s proposal is still unclear, he has not signaled any intention of backing down.
“Stay tuned. We’re just getting started,” Lee’s post ends.