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Show I gvcsJq H ujousH gniou msH rol ef pea&lie lands A solid majority of Nevada lawmakers fired the first shots in a sagebrush rebellion rebel-lion aimed at wresting 53 million acres of land from federal to state control. "We're going to have a head-on confrontation. We're We'-re going to arrest all the BLM," said Senator Norm Glaser, (D-Halleck), a principal prin-cipal sponsor of a bill being introduced in both houses of the Legislature. The bills declare state O sovereignty over most federal lands in the state held mainly by the Bureau of Land Management. The measures create a 20-member 20-member Senate while Assemblyman As-semblyman Dean Rhoads, (R-Tuscarora) had signed up 36 of the 40 assemblymen as co-sponsors of a matching measure in the lower houses Indian, Department of Defense De-fense and federal reclamation recla-mation lands would not be affected by the bill. That would leave about 48 million acres of BLM land and 5 million mil-lion acres in national forests sought by the state. The measures are designed de-signed to force a Supreme Court test of the federal government's right to control con-trol roughly 87 percent of Nevada's land mass, much of it arid and sagebrush covered. cov-ered. "In order to get into court, we'll probably have to arrest the state director of the BLM (Ed Rowland) or one of his agents," Glaser said. The Nevada move is being watched "by all the western land states," said Senator Rick Blakemor,(D-Tonopah) head of a state Select Committee Com-mittee on Public Lands. "They've all been given a copy of this." He said Alaska and Utah were especially interested. Glaser said he and Rhoads planned to meet with Governor Govern-or Bob List to discuss the plan. "We don't want him to Oveto it," Glaser added. Previous sessions of the Legislature have approved , resolutions calling on Congress Cong-ress to release federal lands but the new proposals mark the first time a state set up a lands administration parallel par-allel to the federal government's. |