think the sportsmen have pretty fair access to most of that land. There 

 are four federal agencies managing land in Montana. The U.S. Forest 

 Service, BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Parks. They 

 manage 26,616,000 acres. Montana has 8,140,000 acres of national resource 

 land under control of the BLM. The Forest Service, in their land 

 management area, has 3,150,000 acres of suitable land for grazing. The 

 rest of their land is pretty timber or mountain tops and rock piles. There 

 is some question with other states talking about the Sagebrush Rebellion 

 legislation, whether to divide the subject between BLM and the Forest 

 Service. Nevada only addressed it to BLM. There's not much Forest 

 Service in Nevada, so they were not really concerned about it. The six 

 western states have adopted legislation similar to Nevada Assembly Bill 13, 

 which claims public land retained by federal government within Nevada 

 borders. Section six of this Bill states how they intend to manage this 

 land and I would like to read that. "The public lands of Nevada must be 

 administered in such a manner as to conserve and preserve natural 

 resources, wildlife habitat, wilderness areas, historical sites and artifacts, 

 and to permit the development of compatible public uses for recreation, 

 agriculture and transmission of energy. And other public utility services 

 under principal of multiple use which provide the greatest benefit to the 

 people of Nevada." And Section Seven says "...there should be little 

 change in long-term grazing permits and other uses of this land." Now 

 some land would need to be sold for providing room for western industry 

 and increased population. Obsolete factories in the East and development 

 of energy in the West is certainly going to bring some change in the 

 industrial part of the West. If homesites are a problem. . .you talk about 

 so many homesites being on agriculture land... these large areas of public 

 domain land are not accessable for home-sites. . .so the first choice for a 

 home-site is a piece of more productive land that someone owns that you 

 can buy a piece of and build your home on. That could be a change in 

 land use that could be coming in the future. This entire concept would 

 take several years and a great deal of thought, but at the present time 

 Montana can sit back and watch these other western states because our 

 legislature doesn't meet until next January so we can kind of see what 

 other states are doing. We have been to cattle association meetings of all 

 the western states and the people there interested in Sagebrush Rebellion 

 legislation have kind of agreed on a uniform method of going at this so 

 that it will be kind of a well planned thing rather than each state going 

 its own direction. I do not think many government employees would be 

 removed from the payroll, they'd probably just be working for the State 

 rather than the federal government. But local management done by people 

 raised in the area would be more effective and responsible for the 

 regulations since they are able to adapt themselves to problems and be 

 more readily informed than people trying to do it from the bank of the 

 Potomaic River. Like Gregg told me, this is the first time he has been out 

 of his office for three months. He sure was glad to be here. I was back 

 there for three days and I can sure agree with him. Thank you for 

 listening to me. 



