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Land Exchange
Managing Rural Development and the Environment

Mohave County is one of the fastest growing rural areas in the nation. While 40,000 to 95,000 new residents are expected by the year 2010, only 12 percent of land in the county is privately owned. County officials, local residents, and land managers share concerns about how to plan for impending development and resource conservation.

To address many of these issues, the County recently completed one of the largest land exchanges in the United States. Known as the Hualapai Mountains Land Exchange, the deal allowed approximately 130,000 acres to be traded between the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) public holdings and private land owned by Legend Land, L.L.C.

"Through exchange, federal agencies acquire private lands with important public goods characteristics, such as old growth forests and endangered species habitat," says George Frisvold, an AREC extension agent who helped evaluate the land exchange proposal. "In return, public landholdings are privatized, allowing development and commercial activities in less sensitive areas."

Prior to the exchange, the private lands--which were originally deeded to the Santa Fe Pacific Railroad Company--were dispersed in a "checkerboard pattern" over a wide area, including the Hualapai Mountains and Dutch Flatlands south of Kingman. This intermingling pattern of private and public land was due to an 1860s' policy of granting railroads odd-numbered sections of land for each mile of track built, Frisvold explains.

With Legend Land, a division of Ben Brooks and Associates of Phoenix, planning to subdivide and sell the land for development, this pattern also posed a possible threat to wildlife habitat in the area. "Some of that area is critical habitat for species that are endangered or threatened," Frisvold says.

Under the exchange agreement proposed in 1997, BLM will be able to consolidate habitat for two endangered species, the Hualapai Mexican vole and the Mexican spotted owl. "An exchange will avoid habitat being fragmented and surrounded by development and also avoid protracted and costly legal battles over endangered species," Frisvold notes.

Despite these environmental benefits, government officials, local ranchers, and recreational organizations have been concerned about other possible impacts. "The exchange is going to have an effect," Frisvold says, "but they haven't really had a handle on what it's going to do."

At the request of these groups, researchers from The University of Arizona were asked to analyze the proposal. Frisvold, along with AREC research specialist Trent Teegerstrom and Jim Chamie of the Office of Arid Lands Studies, conducted an independent study of the socioeconomic impacts of the exchange.

Cattle ranching is the main economic activity in the exchange area. Ranchers have BLM grazing permits, with large portions of their ranches made up of a mix of lands leased from Legend Land and BLM. Regardless of the exchange, Legend Land planned to eventually cancel these leases and subdivide their holdings.

"The exchange will affect which ranches and which portions of ranches will be subject to lease cancellation and future development," Frisvold says. "It will also affect cattle stocking rates, access to water, and access to range improvements."

To assess these impacts, the research team surveyed individual ranches in the exchange area. "We tried to get a baseline of their ranch operations, how they were doing in terms of costs and returns," Frisvold explains.

This information was used to construct three "representative ranch" budgeting models. The researchers analyzed both the immediate and long-term effects of the exchange for each of the three groups.

Under the proposal, one group of ranches will have acreage moving from public to private ownership. This group will lose more of their leased land to future development. Ranches with acreage moving from private to public ownership will maintain more of the leased land. Some ranches have acreage both going from public to private and vice versa. The exchange will allow this group to maintain a smaller, yet consolidated operation.

The researchers assessed the economic viability of these different ranches under favorable and unfavorable future market conditions. "You want to give people a sense of how this is going to affect their ability to get through a bad year," Frisvold explains. "We tried to give them a range of values to help them plan."

In addition to analyzing the long-term effects of development under the proposal, the researchers also looked at how development would have impacted the ranchers if the exchange had not taken place. "I think the bottom line for the ranchers is that development is going to threaten the viability of some of their operations," Frisvold says.

For some ranches, their viability will be threatened by development, regardless of the exchange. However, the researchers concluded the exchange will mitigate the negative impacts of development for other ranches. "In some cases the exchange actually makes a difference in terms of whether that ranch can survive or not," Frisvold says.

The researchers also looked at the impact the exchange will have on public services. "The exchange will create a contiguous block of 200 square miles of private land for development along major roadways," Frisvold notes. Without the exchange, development could have occurred over 500 square miles. The cost of providing services in a concentrated area, will be less than if development were spread out over a larger area.

The greatest cost savings will be in construction of roads and sewer lines, the researchers concluded. The exchange will also reduce the County's costs for providing police, fire, and emergency services.

The researchers' findings were included in the environmental impact statement released by BLM. Community members and government officials were given a chance to review this document before it was submitted to the Department of Interior, which approved the proposal in January 1999. The exchange also received support from the Mohave County Public Land Use Committee, which has local rancher representation, as well as unanimous support from the Mohave County Board of Supervisors.

The exchange was made final in March, with 70,238 acres of land in the Hualapai and McCracken Mountains being placed in public ownership. Another 60,057 acres of public land were transferred to Legend Land, making for the largest single public/private land exchange in Arizona.

As a result of the exchange, 3,950 acres were added to three designated "Areas of Critical Environmental Concern," according to John Christensen, BLM Kingman field manager. This includes protected habitat for the two endangered species in the area, as well as other sensitive wildlife, such as the Sonoran desert tortoise and several big game species.

"The public has gained a tremendous amount of resources," Christensen notes. "This exchange represents what an important tool land exchanges can be for public land managers."

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