Trading Away the West Home


Part 4 / The Bureaucrats

Copyright © 1998 The Seattle Times Company

Posted at 10:09 a.m. PDT; Wednesday, September 30, 1998

Judge says Wyoming appraisals failed the test of impartiality


If you were buying property, would you accept the seller's appraisal?

The speaker who posed that question to an audience of rural Wyoming ranchers intended to illustrate the importance of getting an appraisal done by an independent party.

But one person in the room - Charles Wilkie, a manager from the federal Bureau of Land Management - raised his hand to signal that, yes, he would accept an appraisal done by the seller.

That may explain why Wilkie was willing to trade 5,390 acres of federal land in northern Wyoming for just 2,379 acres of private land - based on an appraisal done by the businessman pushing the deal.

The appraisal, done by one of the partners in Great Western Land Exchange, said the land offered by his company was worth twice as much per acre as the federal lands.

The deal would have been completed if a headstrong local opponent hadn't appealed it all the way up to the Interior Department's Board of Land Appeals in Arlington, Va.

It took citizen activist John Jolley $12,000 in legal fees and expenses to get one of the board's administrative law judges to state the obvious: An appraisal performed by the party proposing an exchange doesn't meet the legal standard for impartiality.

Agency officials had argued that the corporate official who did the appraisal was a professional appraiser who received a flat fee for his valuation.

But it wasn't the appraisal fee that concerned the judge. It was the money Great Western would make off the exchange itself. The firm's profit was tied directly to how much public acreage it got for its land, he said.

Now, the case has gone back to the local office of the Bureau of Land Management for a new appraisal. In a recent interview, Wilkie said that - though he trusts Great Western officials - it was a bad idea to use their appraisal because of public perception. Jolley said he's still worried. He has asked agency higher-ups to take the matter out of the hands of Wilkie and the state BLM director who endorsed Wilkie's actions.

"If these people were in the private sector, they would've been run out of the state by now," Jolley said. "We've got to find a way to hold the people entrusted with our land accountable for what they do with it."



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