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So which are craziest, flatearthers, sovcits, or ...?

JayUtah said:
Quite likely, although perhaps a special brand. Land ownership, possession, and use are nuclear-fusion-hot topics out here in the American West, especially where Mormon settlement in the 1840s is concerned. You may have heard of some guy named Ammon Bundy.

The U.S. government claims ownership of vast swathes of western states. Approximately 60% of Utah is controlled by the federal government and administered out of an office in Colorado, with little if any attention paid to inhabitants or local elected officials. Naturally there is a lot of activity in objecting to and resisting this situation. Not all of it is strictly the "free man on the land" philosophy that SovCits advocate. Most of them have at least some foot in a claim made according to ordinary government, not some fanciful alternative to it.
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BLM is centered around states, so the BLM land in Utah is administered out of the Utah State office in Salt Lake City. USFS Region 4 HQ is in Ogden.

The only BLM office in Colorado that has any say in Utah is the National Operations Center (NOC, in the Denver Federal Center), but they mostly only handle travel, hiring, payroll and that kind of stuff.

I was BLM in Utah for five years (St. George), we got zero direction from anyone in Colorado, I met monthly with county officials though. National HQ has since been moved back to D.C., just like all other federal agencies.

The National Park Service has it's Intermountain Regional Office in Denver, that's the only big land management agency operating in Utah but with it's regional office outside of Utah. They've got a fair bit less land than either USFS or BLM.
 
crescent said:
The National Park Service has it's Intermountain Regional Office in Denver, that's the only big land management agency operating in Utah but with it's regional office outside of Utah. They've got a fair bit less land than either USFS or BLM.
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Hm, thanks for the corrections. I think the NPS is currently what everyone's talking about because of the scale of Bears Ears. Does that conform to your experience?
 
JayUtah said:
Hm, thanks for the corrections. I think the NPS is currently what everyone's talking about because of the scale of Bears Ears. Does that conform to your experience?
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In my experience (11 years NPS, 5 years BLM, 9 [and counting] with USFS), each NPS superintendent has much more discretion than any BLM or USFS counterpart in most things not related to wildland fire.

But then again, Bears Ears is BLM, not NPS.

Creation of that National Monument was an Antiquities Act authorized "proclamation" (essentially an Executive Order). Most agency input would have been from Senior Executive Service political appointees (Obama admin), with information (but few opinions) provided by on-site career staff as requested. Then a Management Plan EIS done by regular civil service staff, but obviously constrained by the specific wording of the proclamation. That was mostly all BLM but probably some input from the NPS as they're the experts on the Antiquities Act - but then again this was not BLM's first NM, they have experience of their own.

Then a White House (Trump admin) Executive Order to review a number of Antiquities Act authorized designations. Followed by an order from the President to reduce the size of the monument. I am not sure what sort of "order" that the reduction was was. Like I don't know if it was an Executive Order in its own merit or something else or something tiered off of the previous Executive Order to review designations. That would have likely kicked off a new round of management planning by the career civil service staff.

The a Biden admin EO to review the reduction in size that the Trump admin had ordered. This proceeding alongside lawsuit activity challenging the previous administration's reduction of the boundaries (which apparently had never happened before with Antiquities Act designated NMs), followed by restoration of the original (Obama admin) boundaries.

So most of what you are hearing about was probably the original designation, mostly driven by people at the very upper levels. It was a political decision, not administrative. Then local staff development of the Management Plan tiering off Antiquities Act and Federal Lands Policy and Management Act, and Omnibus Public Lands Management Act - administrative (not political) but tiering off of laws and EOs which were obviously developed via political processes.
 
crescent said:
So most of what you are hearing about was probably the original designation, mostly driven by people at the very upper levels. It was a political decision, not administrative. Then local staff development of the Management Plan tiering off Antiquities Act and Federal Lands Policy and Management Act, and Omnibus Public Lands Management Act - administrative (not political) but tiering off of laws and EOs which were obviously developed via political processes.
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This may be the operative element, and specifically that it is perceived as a political decision among people largely not visible at the local level. And keep in mind that a lot of the complainers are probably SovCit-similar outliers. That's how we got onto this.
 
JayUtah said:
It wasn't about money. It was about freedom and sovereignty, so that's why we can consider themselves sovereign citizens of a sort.
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Jim_MDP said:
Agreed.
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Disagreed.

Sovereign Citizenship is a specific collection of erroneous legal beliefs, expressed as a strategy to flout the law both in their public conduct and in their arguments in court.

Not all erroneous legal beliefs fit this mold. Not all assertions of freedom from government intrusion fall under the rubric of SovCit epistemology. Just as a conspiracy theory is not naively a theory about a conspiracy, sovereign citizenship is not a mere assertion of citizen sovereignty. There are many compound words and phrases in American English, the meaning of which are not readily understood by examining their component words.
 
I took Jay's lower case sovcit (and "of a kind") to indicate a bucket including the anti-govs and FotLers, which I thought the Bundys ascribed to. Hence, I agreed.
Not the upper case with their Admiralty/Maritime/UCC and now Moroccan Treaty of Peace and Friendship bs.
But I take your point.
 
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