the audit

New York Times Nails Nevada

Local press has homer blindness on land-use story

January 3, 2008

Sometimes parachuting in on a story can give readers a better perspective than they get from those already on the ground.

In early December, The New York Times exposed on its front page how local governments in Nevada have funneled billions of dollars from federal land sales—money supposed to go mostly toward conservation—into things like local services and even bocce and shuffleboard courts, while encouraging urban sprawl.

The Times article raised the hackles of the local press and Nevada politicians, but it convincingly and dispassionately spells out how nearly $3 billion in federal funds have been spent mostly on pork-barrel projects in the state since 1998, when Congress passed a law to preserve environmentally sensitive lands by selling federal land. Ironically, the law has promoted urban sprawl and resulted in a net loss of protected land.

This story has import beyond the billions spent in the Silver State, because other western states are eyeing the Nevada public-lands law as a model to cash in on federal land in their own states. But The Las Vegas Sun and The Las Vegas Review-Journal have both played the homer here, lashing out at the Times for exposing the largesse and illustrating how hard it can be for a metro or regional paper to write critically about a federal program that brings the bucks into its backyard.

Here are Times reporters Jesse McKinley and Griffin Palmer on the arguments for and against the Nevada land law:

Supporters say the law, which authorized competitive auctions, has been a godsend for a region dealing with rampant population growth, limited room to grow, scarce water and facilities overwhelmed by their own popularity.
But critics see it as having created a limitless federal bank account that has encouraged and subsidized unbridled growth at the expense of taxpayers from the 49 other states, all while Nevada continues to draw new residents as a low-tax state disinclined to pay for such projects itself.

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As McKinley and Palmer gauge the law’s impact since its inception, the law’s critics come off as the voices of reason. More than $1 billion has “been allocated for parks, trails and nature areas,” including “a $1.4 million softball complex in Caliente, a $10 million Las Vegas park with bocce and shuffleboard courts and a $1.5 million planning grant for picnic grounds in Alamo.”

Not exactly conservation.

Furthermore, the Times says “local authorities are getting even bolder in using the proceeds from the federal land sales for expenses not traditionally covered by money from federal taxpayers,” like police, fire, and transportation.

There are two issues here: whether Nevada should get to keep the federal land money at all and how Congress actually intended the money to be used. The Times is primarily interested in the second issue—the use of federal land money on projects for which officials in other states need to raise local funds. Had Nevada used the money for conservation, the story would not have made the front page of the Times. The problem is less that Nevada is getting the federal money than that it is misusing that money.

The issue has provoked emotional responses from more than one corner out West—evidence of Nevada’s long-complicated relationship with the federal government, which owns more than 80 percent of the land in the state.

The Las Vegas Sun last year laid outright claim to the money from federal land sales, calling it “hundreds of millions of dollars a year belonging to Nevada.”

When The New York Times followed up its front-page story with a December 9 editorial criticizing Nevada’s use of the federal money, a Sun columnist shot back with: “Here’s a better fairness question for the enviros at the Times: Why should taxpayers in a state without any nuclear plants have to accept waste?”

Erin Neff, a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist, published a lengthier—and even more defensive—response on December 4 under the headline “More Times idiocy.” The author takes considerable offense at the idea that “we’re stealing from Washington,” and goes on to misconstrue several points in the Times piece.

One of these is the characterization of Nevada as a low-tax state. “Nevada’s tax burden cannot be overstated,” Neff writes. “The state ranks fourth (as in highest) for tax burden, according to the non-partisan Tax Foundation.” In fact, Nevada ranks fourth only after federal taxes are taken into account, and that’s largely because wealthy Californians claim residency to avoid their state’s income taxes, according to a 2003 story in her own paper. In terms of state and local taxes, Nevada ranks thirty-sixth, according to the Tax Foundation, proving the Times assertion that it’s a “low-tax state disinclined to pay for such projects itself.”

Neff goes on to argue: “What the Times suggests is a ‘Christmas list drafted in Carson City’ is still largely all about conservation.” But the Times demonstrates that Nevada has both spent hundreds of millions of dollars on projects that don’t exactly fit the intent of the law and that it has not spent enough money on projects that do fulfill that purpose:

The acquisition and protection of environmentally sensitive land in private hands was a central element of the law’s purpose, but allocations for those purchases have accounted for only about 15 percent ($346.1 million) of the $2.3 billion in approved spending. Moreover, there has been a net loss of protected land…

Spending on conservation projects, a focus of an amendment to the law in 2002, has also lagged behind other construction-heavy categories.

The act’s self-stated intent couldn’t be clearer:

…to provide for the orderly disposal of certain Federal lands in Clark County, Nevada, and to provide for the acquisition of environmentally sensitive lands in the state of Nevada.

The main source of disagreement between the Times and the local press seems to stem from different readings of this statement. The local press seems primarily concerned with the first part—land disposal—while the Timesseems primarily concerned with the second—conservation.

Take, for example, this summary of the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act in a July 2007 Review-Journal article:

[The act] directed the BLM [Bureau of Land Management] to identify excess properties in the Las Vegas Valley and schedule them for auctions.

True. Although notice that the adjective “federal” does not appear in this sentence. Also, what about the conservation aspect? The subsequent sentence has this to say about land-auction expenditures:

The agency then funnels the profits to Nevada schools, and water management, and parks, recreation and conservation projects.

Again, this is not wrong in a narrow sense, but its balance is way off. None of these expenditures other than conservation are listed in the act’s purpose, and although the other expenditures are allowed—raising the issue of whether they should be—they are not meant to be the act’s focus.

According to the 1998 law, 5 percent of proceeds must go to a state education fund, 10 percent must go for water infrastructure in Clark County, and 85 percent must go to a variety of conservation-related projects. A 2002 amendment inserted a provision for the development of “parks, trails and natural areas.”

All this federal largesse isn’t enough for developers, who have exacerbated Clark County’s sprawl with the federal land they’ve bought. An October 2007 article in the Review-Journal reports that the business community (particularly construction types) wants more:

Fearing that Las Vegas slowly is running out of property for development, business leaders are suggesting that Congress expand the amount of federal land in Clark County that could be open to builders…
They also suggested that Congress expand the Southern Nevada public land law so that profits from federal land auctions in the valley could be used for a wider range of benefits.

Nevada Senator Harry Reid said he would consider the request, but he also warned that altering the policy would be risky. The article explains that the 1998 act was “unusually generous to Nevada.”

That sounds about right. But for the most part, if you wanted a full exploration of this issue, you had to look to the Times. In fact, even the Sun gave the Times a nod. Without commenting on the land-money law, a reporter on the paper’s Politics blog advised readers to “spend some time” with the Times piece. We second that.

Elinore Longobardi is a Fellow and staff writer of The Audit, the business-press section of Columbia Journalism Review.