LETTER: Nevada sportsmen and federal land sales

In response to your Aug. 3 editorial “Rebutting concerns from left, right about releasing federal lands”.

Our nation’s public lands system is one of America’s greatest ideas. Selling them without community input or clear public benefit is not.The reasons that hunters opposed the latest attempt to sell off our hunting grounds were largely threefold.

First, selling public lands without community input and without considerations for infrastructure and water availability would not have provided a guaranteed solution to Nevada’s issues with housing affordability. Placing new “affordable housing” on the outskirts of Las Vegas, for example, makes little sense when most of the jobs held by new homeowners are likely to be in the center of the city.

Second, many of the areas described in the editorial as “empty space” are actually where Nevada hunters pursue quail, deer, elk and wild sheep. They’re where we’ve built water guzzlers and where we’re performing habitat rehabilitation to keep our wildlife populations healthy for future generations. The hunting community took issue with these areas being on the auction block without consulting the stakeholders who depend on them most. With public land habitat on the decline in Nevada for several reasons, hunters will continue to defend the habitat and conservation funding that is so important for our traditions.

Lastly, we believe that when public lands are sold for economic reasons, it should be done only with the support of local stakeholders, and the proceeds should always be reinvested back into Nevada’s public lands, not into general U.S. Treasury coffers to support short-sighted ideas. The former is the way that public lands sales have always been conducted in this country, and the latter would have set a worrying precedent that would have opened Nevadans to the loss of hunting and fishing grounds without community input.