Over the past few weeks, my computer has been getting clogged with ads from a group called Stand For Our Land. There have been a ton of TV commercials, too.  I’ve generally ignored them, but one day looked a little more closely. The website the ads want you to visit is a Utah.gov web address. In other words, the ad campaign is sponsored by the state of Utah. That seemed odd, so I decided to dig in a little deeper. Utah’s state government has filed a lawsuit against the United States of America at the U.S. Supreme Court (one of the few situations where a lawsuit can begin at the Supremes rather than working its way up through appeals).  Utah is claiming that it is being unfairly and wrongly treated by the federal government because there is a lot of federally owned land in Utah, and there isn’t much federally owned land in, say, Pennsylvania. So it must be unfair. The federal government owns about 70% of the land area in Utah. Some of it is national parks/monuments, some national forests, and there are military installations, post offices, federal reservoirs and so on. And then there are about 18.5 million acres of land that is undesignated. It’s really what was left over after the homesteading era ended — the stuff nobody wanted because you couldn’t survive on it. In 1976, that all got assigned to the Bureau of Land Management, which was designed as the manager of those lands, to hold and use them for the public benefit, indefinitely.  A lot of the BLM land is the west desert. Some is the canyon country in southern Utah. It was mostly “junk” by the agrarian standards of the 1880s. Some of it is rich with archeological value, some incredibly scenic, and some has potential mineral wealth underneath it.  Utah remains weirdly focused on coal deposits in the Kaiparowits Plateau despite the fact that there isn’t much of a market for coal any more.The argument is that the U.S. Constitution gives Congress authority to “dispose” of federal land. It doesn’t say it has the authority to hold it long term, or manage it in a way that prevents people from driving their ATVs over it. The Constitution doesn’t expressly say that Congress has the authority to acquire public land by waging war against Mexico, though that’s how the Feds got Utah and most of the West in the first place. They stole it fair and square, then made it available to private owners through the Homestead Act of 1862 and other programs, including the Mining Act of 1872 (which is still in effect). And what they couldn’t give away is still there, owned by the Feds.I read through the court filing, hoping to figure out what Utah really wants. I couldn’t tell. The PR campaign sounds like Utah wants the Feds to hand over the deed to the BLM lands. But the court filing doesn’t say that. The court filing says they want the Feds to “begin the process of disposing of the unappropriated” land.  =It doesn’t say how it should be disposed of. It just asks that the Feds “dispose” of the land. The requested outcome is murky, at best.The Utah position seems to be that the state would benefit from the disposition. If the state ended up owning it, the state could collect grazing fees and mineral royalties that now go to the national treasury, or sell it to the favorite crony of the Legislature to build another golf course in St. George. If privatized, the state would have property taxes and other revenue from the private use of the land.  There is a claim that Utah deserves to be on “equal footing” with Eastern states that don’t have federal lands in them despite very different histories of settlement and the acquisition of the lands in the first place.I don’t trust the state of Utah to be a good steward of the land, given their general approach to land use in the state. They are not a benevolent, conservation organization. So despite frustrations with the federal management, I don’t see any real benefit to the BLM land passing to the state. But it’s an interesting idea.What really caught my attention is why the state government is spending tax money running a glitzy propaganda operation in support of a lawsuit. Nobody gets to vote on this except for the nine Supreme Court justices. I don’t understand what a public relations campaign does to impact that, other than maybe showing Clarence Thomas some cool places where he can park the RV his buddy gave him.Because the land is currently owned by the federal government, it seems like the policy discussion ought to be happening in Congress, where they are unable to keep the lights on, let alone decide on the long-term use of 18.5 million acres of BLM land in Utah.  Instead, we have a lawsuit asking the court to declare that the Feds need to begin the process of disposing of the land in some unspecified way, to unspecified successors, for unspecified purposes. Just because. I don’t know what the state’s PR push behind this is costing us taxpayers, but it seems like a questionable use of state funds to gin up support for an equally questionable state policy.Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.The post More Dogs on Main: Tax dollars at work appeared first on Park Record.