One Colorado county might be gearing up for a confrontation with the federal government over road closures on public land.
Montezuma County — its seat is Cortez — sits in the southwest corner of the state, and its sheriff, Dennis Spruell, told the Denver Post last week that he is pondering certain matters of conscience.
“When I ran for office the No. 1 question I was asked was what are you going to do about the encroachment of the federal government? The people here have just had enough. They are really tired of the federal government telling them what to do,” he said.
It might seem odd that people who live on land taken by the U.S. Army from Mexico, land that was surveyed by federal employees and acquired from the Utes by other federal employees, etc. would be talking about “encroachment.”
But there are some deeper theories that don’t involve conspiracies. One such theory is that the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are unconstitutional.
The federal government is a government of limited power as defined in the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution grants the U.S. Congress the authority “To establish Post Offices and post Roads” and to purchase land “for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings.”
There’s not a word about national forests or national parks or wildlife refuges, so by this logic, unless the land relates to military or postal uses, the federal government can’t own or manage it and thus all those annoying rules about not chewing up the countryside with an ATV are unconstitutional.
However, there’s another constitutional provision that might be relevant: “The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States,” which would appear to give Congress the power to regulate the use of federal land and to establish agencies like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
These issues pop up every few years. In my part of Colorado, about 200 miles from Cortez, things had been pretty quiet on the road-closure front for the past two years until this spring. One day I saw motorcycles racing around a closed area, and a few days later, on another closed route, the closure sign had been knocked over (again) and the rocks that blocked the old rutted road had been moved so that at least two vehicles could get through — to go less than a mile to a dead end.
There are public protests in Cortez, and private attacks on closures here and doubtless elsewhere in the rural West. I’ve seen no evidence that there’s any co-ordination in these assaults on travel plans, but even so, a long, ugly summer might lie ahead.
Essays in the Range blog are not written by High Country News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.
Ed Quillen is a freelance writer in Salida, Colo.
Image courtesy Flickr user Vlasta Juricek.
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