Will Roush: There are active efforts to look at selling public lands to private developers to build housing. And you know, I wanna be really clear. There have been instances and there are still opportunities where very specific pieces of public lands, those that are, you know. oftentimes old administrative sites, or other pieces of forest service or BLM land that just happen to be literally right in the middle of communities.
Marilyn Gleason: Is that like our Forest Service office right here on Main Street?
WR: Yeah. So that's owned by the Forest Service. And if for some reason they said, ‘Gosh, we don't want to use this as an office anymore’ - and to be clear, I think they should keep that as an office, and they obviously will because they're building a new building on it - but that's a piece of Forest Service land. It's public land that's on Main Street, and that's a place where you could say, sure, let's look at some housing there. There was a parcel in El Jebel, and the Forest Service went through a whole process to look at the possibility of selling or leasing that land in Eagle County for housing.
MG: And they did up in Aspen too, that very valuable property they had in Aspen. Part of that got cut off and sold for a lot of money.
WR: Yeah, and they needed that to finance some of their other projects. So those are the types of pieces of technically public land that I think we absolutely can and should look at and go through the right public process.
But there's unfortunately an initiative between the Department of Interior and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where they're creating a task force to look at selling off potentially hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands that could be as much as 10 miles from communities.
And that's disingenuous and, honestly, would just benefit land speculators, right? You buy these parcels, there's not necessarily any guarantee that they'd be actually used for affordable housing per se, but would just go to the benefit of folks looking to make a buck off our public lands.
