Transcripts

TOM MEERSMAN: The 10 specific lawsuits before the appeals court can be divided into two categories, the state's case and the landowners' cases. The state's case is that the BWCA Wilderness Act gives the federal government too much power, power over waterways that are, in fact, owned by the state. Attorney Wayne Olson argued that Minnesota has a respectable history of protecting its waters and that previous state regulations have never endangered adjoining federal lands. Therefore, he said, there's no reason under the new law for the federal government to extend its authority and restrict recreational uses of the area by motorboats and snowmobiles.

SPEAKER 1: It's only with the adoption of the 1978 act that the federal government now claims they have the right to regulate state lands and waters to the same extent that they can regulate the federal lands. If they can do it here, they can do it in every federal area in the country. And we think it's clearly not constitutional.

TOM MEERSMAN: Attorneys representing the federal government and environmental groups disagreed. Brian O'Neill represents the Sierra Club, the League of Women Voters, and nine other citizena groups.

BRIAN O'NEILL: The federal government clearly has, under all of the legal precedents, the power to regulate adjacent lands and waters whenever it's necessary to further the purposes of the federal lands. In this case, of the 1,100,000 acres within the boundary waters, the federal government owns 800,000 acres. It owns almost all of the land and water within those boundaries. Those lands and waters are worthless to the federal government as a wilderness unless it can regulate the other incidental property holdings within the boundaries.

TOM MEERSMAN: Some of those other property holdings are owned by private citizens, and it's their claims that constitute a second set of appeals. The Lac La Croix Indian band is challenging the BWCA Wilderness Act on the basis that federal motorboat restrictions interfere with their livelihoods as fishing guides. Other owners object to sections 5A and 5C of the Wilderness Act. 5A says the federal government must buy any resort in the wilderness that its owner wants to sell.

But when that happens, all other property on that lake or waterway becomes subject to 5C, which requires landowners who want to sell their property to first offer it to the federal government, which then has 100 days to decide whether or not it wants to buy. Landowners contend that those provisions complicate real estate transactions, hurt property values, and violate their constitutional rights. Many of them are represented by Duluth attorney Keith Brownell.

KEITH BROWNELL: If the rest of the nation feels, by gum, we're going to have a canoe area up there, and there will be no motors, no logging, no nothing, the people of the United States can do that through eminent domain. But then they pay for it. What they're doing here is they want that, but they're zoning it. In zoning, you don't have to pay a nickel.

And that's what the federal government has done. They've zoned those lakes, even though they don't own them. They've zoned it so that you can't use motors, and they haven't paid a nickel for it. They've got this right of first refusal and haven't paid a nickel for it. They've, in effect, had their way as to what the use of that land should be, which I could argue with, but I can't argue with Congress. But they've had the use of it, but they haven't paid a nickel for it.

TOM MEERSMAN: For his part, environmental attorney O'Neill says the provisions in Section 5 make sense to him.

BRIAN O'NEILL: The federal government and the Congress was faced with a problem when they wrote that into the law. What happens if the government buys a resort on a lake for $2 million, and that resort, without additional land around the lake, is worthless for a federal purpose? Then the government has wasted $2 million of the taxpayer's money. So what the Congress did in section 5C of the act is give the government an opportunity to acquire additional properties around these lakes. That makes sense. It's legitimate, and indeed it's fair to affected resort owners.

TOM MEERSMAN: What's fair, or at least what's legal, is now before the District Court of Appeals. A ruling is not expected for several months, and attorneys for all parties say that decision could be appealed to the US Supreme Court. I'm Tom Meersman.