2011 Market Update: Chip Lenihan has been fly-fishing Colorado’s best waters for 40 years. His side gig? Running the Telluride office of Fay Ranches as lead broker. The Land Report turned to this former mayor of Telluride for an update on today’s recreational properties market.

Describe today’s market in one word.
Value.

How is that manifested?
Buyers are willing to sit back and wait until they get real value for their money.

Who’s driving today’s market?
The biggest part of my business is families. Men tend to drive the decision-making on hunting properties and ag land, and women trend more in the direction of resort sales, ones that are closer in to town and that feature more amenities. But come rain or shine it’s families who are looking to enjoy the sort of lifestyle you can only find out in the great wide open.

What’s been the biggest surprise of 2011?
The number of investors parking their money in land. The capital is out there. But after what happened in 2008, no one is in a hurry to put it in traditional markets.

Elaborate.
Five years ago, land was a hot commodity. Everybody wanted to get on board before the train left the station. And that brought a lot of buyers with short-term horizons into our market. Today, investors recognize the value inherent in current markets. A good number of them are looking at land as a smart buy, one with proven returns, long range stability, plus big upside from a personal standpoint.

Public land. Do buyers want to border national forest or BLM, or should they steer clear?
Great question. if you’re scouting a potential property and it borders public land, it’s absolutely essential to determine how intensely it’s used. Are you up against an unused corner of a national forest? Great. That will add a 10% to 20% premium to the value of your property. Does a hunting outfitter operate a base camp right across your fence line that’s going to bring in 25 guns for deer and elk season? Might not be your cup of tea.

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Madeleine Pickens is no ordinary horsewoman. A lifelong equestrian, she has led numerous champions into the winner’s circle, including the Hall of Fame Thoroughbred Cigar, winner of 16 consecutive races. Now she is championing a new cause: America’s wild horses.

“Wild horses are a living symbol of the pioneering spirit of Americans and the America West,” she says. Her goal is to establish a 501(c)(3) eco-sanctuary for all horses currently in holding facilities on BLM lands. Similar to a national park, it would be a tourist attraction as well as a refuge. To that end she has submitted a proposal to the Bureau of Land Management to create a public/private partnership that would not only locate appropriate land with sufficient forage and water sources but allow wild horses and burros to be free‐roaming and able to form natural bands.

“While the primary objective of the project is to care for these wonderful creatures, we will also be stewards of the land,” she says.

In March during hearings on H.R. 1018, Restoring Our American Mustangs (the ROAM Act), Pickens testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands Committee on Natural Resources. She has also submitted a plan to initially alleviate conditions for 10,000 wild horses currently being penned in BLM short-term holding facilities.

“My view is for a wild horse sanctuary that will be a tourist destination similar to our national parks where Americans and tourists from around the world can come, observe and be a part of this great part of American history. We can use this treasure to promote ecotourism and at the same time provide for permanent retirement and management of these American icons to which we owe so much,” she says.

To that end, she is urging those who cherish the wild mustang and support her initiative to contact Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to stop the slaughter and confinement America’s wild horses and burros.

To join the thousands who have already petitioned Secretary Salazar as well as read more about her plan, The Land Report encourages you to visit her website.

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Three years ago, BLM received six applications for solar energy projects. In the last year? 130, including one for 300,000 acres from Cogentrix Solar Investments.

The focus of the investigation is renewable energy companies as well as speculators that have applications pending for BLM leases and are seeking to be acquired based on the value of those applications.

According to the LA Times:

Officials said last week that the inspector general’s office of the Department of the Interior was investigating Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar Inc.’s recent acquisition of Hayward, Calif.-based OptiSolar, and its unfinished renewable energy projects, for $400 million.The deal gave First Solar control of what the company described as OptiSolar’s “strategic land rights” to 136,000 acres of public land in San Bernardino, Riverside and Kern counties.

In acquiring OptiSolar, First Solar acquired the lease applications, not the land itself. Those applications are no guarantee according to Greg Miller of the BLM.

“There is no value associated with a mere application, which could be rejected by us for a variety of reasons,” Miller told the Times.

As a result, application approvals for solar energy projects have been suspended while officials sort out what’s going on.

Read more at:
“Renewable Energy Sparks a Probe of a Modern-Day Land Rush,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2009.

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On Friday the Interior Department ruled that Americans will be able to carry concealed weapons in some federal parks and wildlife refuges. The announcement overturns a decades-old Reagan Administration regulation that required all guns brought into national parks and wildlife refuges be unloaded and kept in an out-of-the-way place such as the trunk of the car.

The new regulation does, however, comes with caveats. 

The final rule, which updates existing regulations, would allow an individual to carry a concealed weapon in national parks and wildlife refuges if, and only if, the individual is authorized to carry a concealed weapon under state law in the state in which the national park or refuge is located.

According to Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Lyle Laverty, the regulation allows individuals to carry concealed firearms in federal parks and wildlife refuges to the same extent they can lawfully do so under state law.

“America was founded on the idea that the federal and state governments work together to serve the public and preserve our natural resources,” Laverty said. “The Department’s final regulation respects this tradition by allowing individuals to carry concealed firearms in federal park units and refuges to the extent that they could lawfully do so under state law. This is the same basic approach adopted by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the United States Forest Service (USFS), both of which allow visitors to carry weapons consistent with applicable federal and state laws.”

This week the rule will be published in the Federal Register. It will take effect 30 days later.

Here is the complete text of the announcement from the Office of the Secretary of the Interior Department.

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When the U.S. Supreme Court convened in October, the men (and woman) in black did not discuss landowner water rights. And for a pair of longtime Idaho ranchers—and perhaps other landowners—no news might mean bad news.

For the moment, the court has made no decision on whether to take up the case of Joyce Livestock vs. the United States. Earlier this year, Joyce and LU Ranching won a ruling against the federal government in Idaho’s Supreme Court in a potentially precedent-setting case of grazing rights.

Ranchers have long been subject to the rules set by the Bureau of Land Management under the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act. That act allows federal officials to set the terms under which ranchers can use public lands, including whether and how much water can be used.

But in 2005, Joyce and LU challenged that law as it applied to Idaho’s Snake River Basin. They argued that because they had operated in the area for more than 100 years—long before the Taylor Act—they had established water rights that the government could not remove.

By February of this year, their case reached the Idaho Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the livestock firms. But the court did not allow the companies’ claim to have the U.S. government pay their $1.3 million court fees. Idaho’s Supreme Court said the government did not act frivolously. The ranchers argued that the Equal Access to Justice Act—a law intended to prevent the government from running roughshod over small businesses and individuals by prolonging expensive litigation—entitled them to court costs. But the Idaho court said it had no jurisdiction to rule on that claim, leaving the U.S. Supreme Court as the last resort.

With the court’s docket already set until next year, precedent-watchers will have to wait on a final outcome.

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Under a federal law, the BLM, an arm of the Department of the Interior, has begun buying private properties that carve into federal wildlife refuges, national parks, national forests, and their ilk, making those lands difficult to access or manage. Though the law—the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act—was passed in 2000, federal agencies had not used it to make a land acquisition until this fall. In September, the BLM, working with the Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service, offered $18 million to snap up 19 parcels of private land in seven states. Overall, some 9,000 acres of land were acquired in New Mexico, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, and California.

The last of those states provides a good example of the law’s intent. The BLM and other agencies spent $850,000 to buy 321 acres near the Coachella Valley Fringe-toed Lizard Preserve, a tongue-twisting federal wildlife refuge near Palm Springs. The preserve features both sand dunes and rocky hills and is home to the threatened fringe-toed lizard, which is found nowhere else in the world. The reason the BLM wanted the land was that it separated the preserve from the Joshua Tree National Park.

The equally tongue-twisting Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act can also work the other way around. In cases where federal lands are isolated by surrounding private properties, making them of little value to the government, the BLM can offer those parcels for sale. It can also sell off lands that have clear residential or commercial worth. The BLM has made $95 million from such sales so far.

Most of that money is required to go to further land acquisitions, like the purchases the BLM made in September. “These purchases promote conservation while helping ensure efficient and effective public lands management,” said Lynn Scarlett, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, during the dedication ceremony for the Coachella Valley property.

And if you’re wondering: No, this is not eminent domain. The act stipulates that government agencies only buy property from willing sellers.

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The White House accelerated funding for its Healthy Lands Initiative this year, allocating some $3 million to the Bureau of Land Management. The money must be spent on restoring or maintaining natural habitats on federal lands, and more will be made available in 2008.

But the sum isn’t nearly what one lobbying group is seeking for refuges. The Cooperative Alliance for Refuge Enhancement (CARE), which unites an array of environmental, hunting, and scientific organizations, wants the budget for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Wildlife Refuge System doubled by 2013. CARE has long pushed for more monies to go toward the nation’s wildlife refuges. Yet even with bipartisan support, they’ve won only modest increases. The Fish and Wildlife Service says funding for the refuge system has increased from about $300 million a year in 2001 to $383 million today, but the agency says that’s not enough to keep up with federally mandated raises for employees and deteriorating conditions at many refuges.

CARE agrees. Last spring, the organization released a lengthy report that offered a breakdown of what CARE sees as funding shortfalls for and shabby upkeep at wildlife refuges. The report concludes that the nation’s refuges are at a crisis point. The group wants funding for the National Wildlife Refuge System increased by $55 million next year with continued increases each subsequent year.

Many members of Congress have endorsed CARE’s efforts, including Rep. Jim Saxton (R-New Jersey). Still, at the moment, there is no legislation working its way through the Capitol that would give the refuge system the funding CARE is seeking.

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