What gives EPA this land grabbing Authority?
John Peterson, LICA Director of Government Relations. 22 JAN 2014/jwp
Recently, the residents of Riverton, WY, were shocked to learn their town had been moved from
the State of Wyoming into the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone Indian Tribal land (Wind
River Reservation) without any treaty or authorization from Congress. Matt Mead, the Governor
of Wyoming, is furious. “This decision goes against 100 years of history, involving over a
million of acres of land. It is not a decision that should come from a regulatory agency. I
believe the EPA is wrong and I will not honor its decision,” he said.
In 1905, Congress set the boundaries for the Wind River Reservation based on treaties worked
out over the course of two decades. The EPA unilaterally declared the treaty, which set out that
the tribes would “surrender, forever and absolutely” the land in question, didn’t really mean what
the words plainly say. The government bureaucrats, not necessarily distinguished in
constitutional law, came up with their convoluted interpretation that under the Clean Air Act, the
tribes and not the state can dictate environmental policy in the disputed region. The Clean Air
Act? Really?
Wyoming’s top law enforcement official says the EPA’s nonsensical argument is no accident.
The agency has been collaborating with the tribes to cook up this land grab for five years, and it
dropped the announcement of the land seizure with a mere 60 days’ notice. “EPA not only
reached the wrong conclusion,” says state Attorney General Peter K. Michael, “but the agency
also employed a fundamentally unfair and skewed process to the detriment of the state and its
citizens, in pursuit of a predetermined objective.”
Riverton Mayor Ronald O. Warpness has been taking a lot of phone calls from city residents
worried that they have been moved into “Indian country” through bureaucratic fiat. He assures
them that the dispute will be fought out in the courts.
The federal government has become the single largest landowner in the United States.
Successive “usually liberal” administrations declare new “monuments” that take enormous
swaths of land from private hands. The federal government now holds deeds to more than 630
million acres, nearly 28 percent of all the available land in the country. This includes half of
Wyoming.
Riverton residents never asked to be part of an Indian Reservation, and the federal government
has no business putting them there for whatever purpose. It would have been bad enough had
Congress done this dirty deed, but the EPA? EPA is showing us once again how corrupt it is.
And Congress does nothing to stop it.