EDITORIAL: Federal land decisions defy common sense

Perhaps you’re completely opposed to the movement to return more federal lands to local control. Perhaps you trust the distant federal bureaucracy to best manage land in your community. Perhaps you’d rather deal with a federal agency if you needed a speedy response to a land-use matter of some urgency.

Two local news stories from last week might change your mind.

A July 28 rainstorm flooded Rainbow Canyon on Mount Charleston. The flash flood wiped out a road and damaged some two dozen homes to various degrees. The damage was more severe than it would have been if the area hadn’t burned in last summer’s Carpenter 1 fire.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was prepared to build a 1,700-foot berm to protect the neighborhood. The project could have been completed weeks before the storm that left Rainbow awash in mud. But the federal government wanted Clark County to assume full liability for the structure without allowing the county input on its design. The county was willing to maintain and repair the berm. But because the county wouldn’t assume liability — and millions of dollars in potential costs — Washington didn’t build it.

Gov. Brian Sandoval visited the area Friday and pledged to help get the berm built, even if the state had to assume liability.

But the fact that such deal-making is necessary in the first place, especially when everyone agrees that private property is at risk, is the real outrage here. If residents and the county had control of the area, they could have built it themselves and averted last week’s disaster.

But the frustration on Mount Charleston is nothing compared with the anger of the family of slain Las Vegas cabdriver Keith Goldberg. The family oversaw searches of more than 200 square miles of remote terrain before clues pointed to Lake Mead as his resting place. But the managers of Lake Mead National Recreation Area required permits and a $1 million insurance policy before anyone could search for Mr. Goldberg’s body inside the park. It took months for the family to raise the money and obtain insurance — and two hours to find the body once they entered.

As reported by the Review-Journal’s Steve Tetreault, the family traveled to Washington and waited in a Senate hallway Wednesday to confront a National Park Service official and tell their story.

“If it happened to you, if you had a family and you had a missing family member and there was a good possibility that person was over in that area, was murdered, and you can’t get there, what would you do?” New Jersey resident Jeffrey Goldberg told National Park Service deputy chief Dean Ross.

“Nobody even called us, nobody said anything, nobody cared. It’s like we were nonexistent and that’s the part that hurts so bad, to have a murder in our family but then to go through all the bureaucracy. It’s crazy! It’s really crazy!”

Yes, it’s crazy. The unresponsive, unaccountable federal bureaucracy is unfit to properly address matters of local concern. The only way to bring common sense to land-use decisions is to empower communities and states and give them more control of their land.