This is a complicated topic. I used to own the lower part of a mountain valley (out west but not in Montana). There were two dirt "roads" into the valley, both immediately against the titled property; the rest of the valley was Federal (BLM) land encircled by mountains that were effectively impassable. Americans generally have a right to use and temporarily occupy these Federal lands without permission, so if I put up a gate/sign it would effectively be like owning the entire valley.
There are three big issues when you own land like this that people overlook, both of which can be described as "tragedy of a pseudo-commons":
- The Federal government likes to use these roads across private and public land but not only doesn't do maintenance but enforces a stack of regulations that actively prohibits others from doing repairs to damage caused by their traffic. Filling in a pothole requires environmental impact studies, archaeological assessments, thousands of dollars in fees, etc. The nice dirt roads you find up in ranch country in Federal wilderness areas are often maintained illegally by locals because the government won't do it and the cost of doing it legally is completely unjustifiable. For some people, it is easier to just disallow road access.
- Most ranchers do not own the mineral rights of the land, and mineral rights come with privileges that allow mineral exploration companies to abuse your land for the purpose of mineral extraction with little recourse. An effective strategy to prevent this is to actively prohibit the mineral exploration companies from trespassing to establish that there is mineral worth extracting. I've dealt with this twice. Among other things, it requires aggressive enforcement of a "no trespassing" policy that mineral companies will try to ignore or subvert.
- People thinking that the private land is Federal and acting under those assumptions, including vandalizing, stealing from, and generally trashing things as Federal agencies do very little to police this. Unfortunately, this is a really common problem in wilderness areas. They tend to avoid areas that look like they are actively managed lest a rancher show up -- well-maintained signs and gates are a good proxy.
How this plays out in practice when these issues become a big enough problem that the ranchers start putting up signs and gates everywhere, with the common understanding that these are not for the locals.
After years dealing with the above issues, we eventually did like everyone else and prohibited use of the roads (except for locals of course). I would say it was only marginally effective but it was better than the previous situation.
The whole "locals only" thing is just as bad. How do you communicate to the locals what is okay and what is not? How do you define locals? Is it just those that live on the same road, those that you run into at the store? It has to be all or nothing. That is really what sucks with the whole situation.
You are taking "locals" a bit too literally. It is just a social convention and these are small communities, it is generally understood that unless the property owner has socialized something different, those signs are for mining companies, yahoos from the city, etc. A lot of times if you are not from the area, you can often ask one of the local people the purpose of a sign in some area based on what you want to do. They'll often tell you that you can ignore it as long as you are just passing through. The signs are there to discourage people. In fact, they'll appreciate that you bothered to ask.
I grew up in a small rural area and learned very early that a no trespassing sign means that it is likely to get a warning shot sent your way if cross the line. The signs were not up to just discourage non-locals. I am sure some areas are different but that is my experience in Montana.
That's a fair point. There are some areas where "no trespassing" applies to everyone. A good example of this is in the Nevada gold fields. If you don't respect those signs, you'll be staring at the business end of a gun.
But again, if you talk to one of the locals they will tell you that. I always made a point of doing that, most people don't.
As someone who works in the Nevada gold fields, I can say this is blatantly untrue. This isn't the wild west, you won't find armed guards up here. In general the security is no higher than the average oil refinery.
Anyone with a to mind to could easily drive into an active mining area on BLM land
I'd share your frustrating with mining companies, but is "yahoos from the city" a bit unfair? Your country has brilliant appreciation of the outdoors, including city-dwellers who travel out on weekends or holidays. Signage that informs and guides them rather than bars them might help.
I imagine 99% of people just want to pass through carefully rather than dump trash or graffiti anything.
Yes, "yahoos from the city" is a bit unfair. :-) I was living in the SF Bay Area at the time and most of the out-of-town traffic through the area of that property was also from the Bay Area. We made a point of getting to know the local ranchers early on and I had lived in the rural West as a kid, so I had a vague idea of the basic rules.
More often than not, it wasn't that people were trying to behave badly, they were just careless and exercised poor judgement. A recurring annoyance was someone in the Bay Area buying an SUV and deciding to take it off-roading deep into the wilderness with no prior experience and being completely unprepared. In addition to frequently damaging their vehicle beyond drivability or getting it hopelessly stuck far out of mobile phone range, they would tear up the roads and land joyriding, leave gates open, run into the cattle that live in the wilderness, etc. I probably personally rescued people a dozen times who had no business being out there in those vehicles (an SUV off the new car lot is not equipped for that environment), with that lack of preparation, with that little experience.
Not malicious most times, just ignorant and engaging in poor behavior without understanding that they shouldn't be doing those things.
Elsewhere in these comments are people saying that landowners will remove (public) signage(!), which might impact what the parks people can do?
Maybe a well-publicised term for a private easement that people recognise is treated in a particular way? I like that in the States, National Park means something, BLM means something, etc. Our designations in Australia don't seem as clear. We have Crown land, but I have no idea where to find out about it.
Private easement guides would be: You are a guest here on private land. Don't stray from the road, leave gates as you found them, livestock has right of way, no camping, etc.
Surely there's a balance in making reasonable land access available to people.
This isn't a local or non-locals issue, but it's just that due to the social dynamics of Montana it can get framed in those terms. But, really this is about public access to the public lands which should be sacred, constitutional even, like in Sweden.
Probably a "local" in this context is anyone who is close enough to jandrewrogers' circle that these things are communicated through the grapevine and tacit common understanding.
Did you ever communicate your frustrations on that first point to your local representatives? Seems like there could be softened regulations for certain situations to ease maintenance - e.g., like-for-like maintenance. If there's a sealed road, you can re-seal potholes without any more than advance notice. If it's unsealed, you can regrade it. But if you want to adjust the route or seal an unsealed road, the process is a bit more involved?
You have some incredible wildlife and cultural history in America, so I can understand trying to protect it.
Local representatives don’t get to counter the almighty EPA, which writes and enforces all of the environmental regulations affecting this kind of thing.
Sure, but they have some influence with the EPA. They will at least be able to get a meeting with someone reasonably high up at the EPA and if that fails they can introduce legislation to force the EPA to change the regulations.
Money was the only thing that ever talked in government, the problem is that people have allowed the mandate to grow so outrageously that it's gotten out of hand. I love the original mission of the EPA, which was to do through regulation what was, owing to scale, not feasible in the courts: To assess tangible damage to the property of everyone downwind or downstream of you, and limit it at the source.
Every expansion of that mandate seriously perverts the whole institution, and allows them to justify basically any course of action through a vague mental framework, by means of a network of suggestible and mentally soft bureaucrats who want more than anything to keep their job, no matter how immoral the duties of their office are or have become.
Perhaps you are wondering why you are being down-voted, since your comment is well-meant and deserves a response. The problem is that arguments like yours are a bit of a fig-leaf covering a system that is designed to work around exactly the process you are talking about.
For the last seventy years or, western democracies have moved power away from traditional branches of government and into the hands of agencies, because political movements were fed up with the slowness, dark compromises and voter-oriented showmanship of traditional democratic machinery.
And indeed those systems really are slow, messy and give incomplete results. So when agencies do behave badly, it is not very helpful (or even true) to say that the tedious checks-and-balance systems that the agencies exist to work around are an effective recourse.
I live in the semi rural west and know many ranchers, family owns a few... i don't know of a single rancher who has been prevented from doing upkeep on roads across their own land that they allow easement to. only issues i know of are if you block a salmon stream, big no no in washington. also, people will vandalize just about anything, the assertion that they do it because its federal might be a bit off, IMO.
i had a run in with a rancher who pulled a gun on me for using public easement he was quickly visited by the local sheriff and had his ideals corrected.
Interesting topic. Could you talk a bit about the state laws that regulate incorporation? For instance, depending on the state, could you incorporate and then ask the state for assistance in requesting authority to maintain the federal roads? Also, how is federal ownership of the land different from if a private entity owned it? If the roads were privately owned, would you still run into the same issues?
This is very complicated and varies from State to State. Incorporation requires meeting some base criteria, such as sufficient population size in the proposed incorporated area (usually a few hundred people), and often requires an official act of an elected body. How responsibilities can get allocated technically (i.e. what is legally possible which includes some unusual arrangements in some States) and how those responsibilities get allocated in practice is equally complicated. Generally though, for Federal land, the State has limited authority. They do have indirect authority by virtue of the resources that they do control, such as water, that gives the States practical leverage. Federal land cannot be taxed by the State, so the Federal government subsidizes State property taxes in those States where most of the land is Federal because it is nearly impossible to build a property tax base when 90+% of land in a county is Federal. Not only is there not much property, the fragmentation of the land prevents it from achieving an economically productive critical mass.
Federal land has one important difference from private land or even State land: the regulations regarding management and use are pretty disconnected from the realities of the lands under management or the population that lives there, aggravated by the fact that these decisions are primarily made by people that have live very far away from where most Federal land is located and have no experience with those regions.
I am sympathetic to these problems. Do you think spot fixes could resolve it for good, e.g. sharing road maintenance with the Feds, or does a larger paradigm shift come to mind?
There are three big issues when you own land like this that people overlook, both of which can be described as "tragedy of a pseudo-commons":
- The Federal government likes to use these roads across private and public land but not only doesn't do maintenance but enforces a stack of regulations that actively prohibits others from doing repairs to damage caused by their traffic. Filling in a pothole requires environmental impact studies, archaeological assessments, thousands of dollars in fees, etc. The nice dirt roads you find up in ranch country in Federal wilderness areas are often maintained illegally by locals because the government won't do it and the cost of doing it legally is completely unjustifiable. For some people, it is easier to just disallow road access.
- Most ranchers do not own the mineral rights of the land, and mineral rights come with privileges that allow mineral exploration companies to abuse your land for the purpose of mineral extraction with little recourse. An effective strategy to prevent this is to actively prohibit the mineral exploration companies from trespassing to establish that there is mineral worth extracting. I've dealt with this twice. Among other things, it requires aggressive enforcement of a "no trespassing" policy that mineral companies will try to ignore or subvert.
- People thinking that the private land is Federal and acting under those assumptions, including vandalizing, stealing from, and generally trashing things as Federal agencies do very little to police this. Unfortunately, this is a really common problem in wilderness areas. They tend to avoid areas that look like they are actively managed lest a rancher show up -- well-maintained signs and gates are a good proxy.
How this plays out in practice when these issues become a big enough problem that the ranchers start putting up signs and gates everywhere, with the common understanding that these are not for the locals.
After years dealing with the above issues, we eventually did like everyone else and prohibited use of the roads (except for locals of course). I would say it was only marginally effective but it was better than the previous situation.