(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) Nevada’s newly elected Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo castigated the Biden administration for what he described as a flagrantly mistaken “federal confiscation” of 500,000-plus acres of land for a national monument.
The former sheriff of Clark County said he and his team were left out of the loop as the feds formulated a “unilateral” and anti-business decision to establish the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in a region that includes historic Spirit Mountain.
“Upon learning that the President was considering unilateral action, I reached out to the White House to raise several concerns, citing the potential for terminal disruption of rare earth mineral mining projects and long-planned, bi-partisan economic development efforts,” Lombardo declared.
However, Lombardo said the White House ignored his input when he found out what administration had in mind.
In a strongly worded statement, the governor decried the D.C.-centric approach that he maintains will prove harmful to the southern Nevada economy.
“This kind of ‘Washington Knows Best’ policy might win plaudits from unaccountable special interests, but it’s going to cost our state jobs and economic opportunity—all while making land more expensive and more difficult to develop for affordable housing and critical infrastructure projects,” he said. “The federal confiscation of 506,814 acres of Nevada land is a historic mistake that will cost Nevadans for generations to come.”
Native American tribes consider Spirit Mountain and its environs to be sacred and have long advocated for the area to be protected.
But libertarians supporting property rights and state sovereignty have slammed previous land-grab efforts during the Obama administration to proceed unilaterally in abusing the 1906 Antiquities Act to further extend its own real-estate portfolio.
The presence of rare-earth metal deposits further roils some who note that government regulations prohibiting private, domestic mining ventures will only increase American dependence on China for production of green-energy essentials such as lithium batteries.
This is hardly the first time that the environmentalists in the cohort running the current administration have engaged in top-down, centralized planning.
For instance, in a 2021, Biden expanded federal management of the approximately 3.2-million-acre Bears Ears and Grand-Staircase national monuments in Utah.
This has prompted a still-pending lawsuit filed by Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, who, along with other state elected officials from the governor on down named as plaintiffs, called the action a “federal overreach” without proper collaboration with Congress or stakeholders.
