Land is best managed by those closest to it. Most of the people making decisions about our land use in the West are not doing it out of love of our lands, but to appease their largest donors - the environmental movement.
Case in point is the Colorado River here between Topoc and Havasu. Environmentalists decided the area should be wake free from the lake to the river above Needles. Their reasoning is since birds have taken up residence in the reeds that have grown up in that part of the river, due to silt build up over the years, the birds should be protected. The people who decided this do not live in the area or travel the river in this area and they ignored the residents as well as the city and others who fought this. Our hope is the new administration will see the folly and undo this needless and unwarranted regulation.
When they lowered Roosevelt Lake to increase the height of the dam a bird took up residence on the trees exposed at the lower level of the lake..... these birds migrate to the area every year from Mexico, have done so forever..... all they would do when the lake went back up was relocate to the trees they used to roost in at a higher elevation, but that was not good enough for the environmentalists, nope, we had to spend a fortune to have people manually move their nests from the lower trees to the higher trees before they could refill the lake.
Too many stories of this kind... even here on Havasu which is managed by the BLM, Army Corp of Engineers, State of Arizona, State of California and Lake Havasu City. Too many flies in the ointment. When they raised entry fees at Windsor launch ramp [State of AZ] boaters were furious at Lake Havasu City, our city had nothing to do with the fee increases, in fact the city maintains a free [and very busy] launch ramp on the island, but few visitors are aware of this, they just knew the annual pass was done away with and now it was $15 a day to launch on the weekend. BTW that is a rip off as this $15 does not include the use of one of the camp sites on the lake, that is another fee - and they do come around to collect - that is the BLM.
When there was a huge carp die off the summer of 2009 - it was the city who went out on the lake every morning and scoured campsites along the shores as well as out in the middle of the lake to collect the dead and dying fish - and trust me when it is 120 outside and there is dead fish everywhere - someone has to do it, but BLM or AZ State Parks nor State of California were anywhere to be seen... nope, the one entity w/o responsibility for the lake of the campsites was the entity cleaning up the mess.. Which is normally what happens. So yes, local control is better, much better... The dam is long paid for and makes money from power production... let the city control the lake and collect the fees, it would be much better-managed because there is someone to hold responsible instead of a faceless bureaucrat. In fact the city did for a while during the government shutdown and proved they could do it more efficiently in just a short time.
