House lawmakers and Department of the Interior (DOI) officials will tour Ogden, Utah, next week, scoping out the town as a potential headquarters for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke is making plans to move the headquarters of the BLM out of Washington, D.C., to a city in the western U.S., but a decision has not been made on the new destination. (RELATED: Zinke Is Shipping The Headquarters Of The Largest Land-Owning Agency Out Of DC)
House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop of Utah will lead the tour that will include other members of the committee and the DOI acting assistant secretary for policy, management and budget, Susan Combs. Combs is overseeing the BLM’s transition out of the U.S. capital, Utah’s Deseret News reports.
“We will talk about a couple of things,” Bishop told Deseret News. “We want to talk about the overall reorganization to bring all the agencies in an area together, but we specifically wanted to show what kind of opportunities there will be for businesses that are in outdoor recreation. And yes, [Combs] will be looking at places.”
Zinke reorganizing the Interior on the largest scale in its history, moving as many as three agency headquarters out of D.C. and overhauling the way Interior agencies operate and interact with each other.
Moving the BLM headquarters, which manages about 248 million acres of federal land, west would serve as a good faith gesture to farmers and ranchers who often complain of BLM policies and regulations coming from bureaucrats living potentially thousands of miles away. The new headquarters would be more accessible to the people BLM regulations most affect.
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