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“Tester, Montana’s Democratic senator, bludgeoned his opponent, Tim Sheehy, for his past statements supporting the transfer of federal lands to local control”

BILLINGS – New reporting from POLITICO E&E News is putting a spotlight on why Tim Sheehy’s deeply unpopular plan to sell off Montana’s public lands to his wealthy out-of-state friends is a reason Montanans will reject him at the ballot box this November. 

Protecting access to public lands is a major issue in Montana’s U.S. Senate race, as “more than 80 percent of Montana voters said the protection of public lands is critical when voting for a public official” and “ninety-five percent reported visiting public lands within the last year.”

And despite attempts to rewrite his record on public lands, POLITICO E&E reports that “Sheehy’s past statements suggest otherwise.”

POLITICO E&E News: Tester wields public lands as campaign weapon

By Garrett Downs

October 15, 2024

• In a debate last week, Tester, Montana’s Democratic senator, bludgeoned his opponent, Tim Sheehy, for his past statements supporting the transfer of federal lands to local control — a touchstone issue in a state where nearly a third of the land is owned by federal or state government.
  
• “Tim has made an incredible transformation on this issue,” Tester said. “When he first started running, he said that public lands should be turned over to either his rich buddies or the counties, remove protection. Bad idea.”
  
• Now with less than four weeks to go before Election Day, Tester and his allies are hoping that attacking Sheehy on public lands — including raising questions over Sheehy’s association with a “free market environmentalism” think tank — will provide an opening for the three-term incumbent. 
• “Sheehy has consistently called to transfer off our public lands, which makes it easier to sell them off to his rich buddies and take them out of the hands of Montanans forever,” said Monica Robinson, a spokesperson for the Tester campaign. “Sheehy might be trying to hide from his record of advocating to transfer public lands, but Montanans will not forget in November.”
• It has become a major issue in the election. More than 80 percent of Montana voters said the protection of public lands is critical when voting for a public official, according to a recent University of Montana poll. Ninety-five percent reported visiting public lands within the last year.
• “Montana’s public lands are the lifeblood of how we all live our lives and why we choose to raise our families here,” said Whitney Tawney, the executive director of Montana Conservation Voters. “Threatening that is basically threatening our way of life.”
• The super political action committee affiliated with Tawney’s group has run ads hitting Sheehy for charging hunters to access his privately owned ranch for elk hunting. The group is trying to tie Sheehy to a growing number of wealthy Montana transplants purchasing large swaths of land and prohibiting access. One of the ads claims that Sheehy would “end protections for public lands” to allow the wealthy to purchase it.
• Sheehy’s campaign said the attacks are disingenuous […] But Sheehy’s past statements suggest otherwise.
• In an interview on the Working Ranch Radio Show last year, Sheehy proclaimed that “local control has to be returned and whether that means some of these public lands get turned over to state agencies or even counties, or whether those decisions are made by a local landlord … local control will almost always produce better results than a federal mandate.”
• The Sheehy campaign didn’t address those comments directly in questions submitted by POLITICO’s E&E News. 
• Tester is also attacking Sheehy for serving on the board of the Property and Environment Research Center, a group that advocates for “market solutions for conservation,” and has a history of advocating for alternatives to federal control of public lands. Sheehy failed to disclose his association with the group when he announced his run for the Senate, which runs afoul of Senate ethics rules. He amended it after reporting in HuffPost.
• “Tim even served on a think tank — on their board of directors — that’s job was to privatize our public lands,” Tester said in the debate. “Either they don’t understand the value of it, or it’s just wrong … it’ll impact regular Montanans in a very negative way.”
• Sheehy and PERC both say Tester is wrong about the group… But in the past, the founder of the group has gone much further on public lands.
• In 1999, PERC’s then-president and founder, Terry Anderson, wrote a paper for the libertarian Cato Institute that called for the “auctioning off all public lands over 20 to 40 years.”
• “Both environmental quality and economic efficiency would be enhanced by private rather than public ownership,” the paper said.
• Further, Anderson in 2016 advocated for “franchising” the nation’s national parks, so that they would be run like independent businesses in an effort to make up the National Park Service’s deferred maintenance backlog, according to Outside magazine.
• Sheehy first took a position with PERC in 2022, according to the organization’s financial reports.
  
• “Public lands are foundational to Montana’s heritage and way of life, and Jon Tester will always fight to ensure public lands remain in public hands,” Robinson, the Tester spokesperson, said. “Montanans don’t trust a multimillionaire out-of-stater like Sheehy to protect our public lands because they know he’s trying to turn Montana into a playground for the rich.”
• It’s not the first time a Republican candidate for Tester’s seat has sought to reinvent their position on public lands.
• Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), who ran against Tester and lost in 2018, once called public lands unconstitutional. But when he ran for Senate, Rosendale softened his tone and said public lands belong to the public.
• However, upon returning to the House, Rosendale in 2023 introduced a quartet of bills to defund the Land and Water Conservation Fund — a fund that provides grants for the improvement and acquisition of public lands. The bills would have barred the federal government from acquiring new public lands for conservation.