Most policy fights in Boise stay in Boise. The debate over public lands is different. When federal budget reconciliation talks last summer included a proposal to sell or dispose of potentially millions of acres of western public land, the response from Idaho hunters, anglers, trail runners, mountain bikers, and everyone else who depends on that access was immediate, overwhelming, and by most accounts unprecedented in its scale.

On the second episode of the Ever Onward Podcast’s public lands series, host Tommy Ahlquist sat down with Representative James Petzke, a four-year Meridian legislator who sits on the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee and the Resources and Transportation committees, and Nick Fasciano, executive director of the Idaho Wildlife Federation. The conversation covered how the land sale fight unfolded, why Idaho’s state endowment lands represent a quieter but equally serious vulnerability, and what it will actually take to protect public access for the long term.

Why Public Lands Are What Keep People in Idaho

Petzke grew up in Hailey in the Wood River Valley, came to Boise for college, and has stayed for the same reason most Idahoans who spend time outside stay: the access. The Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness at 2.4 million acres. The Sawtooths and White Clouds. Hells Canyon and the Seven Devils. The Clearwater country in the north. The Owyhees in the south. He rattled through the list not as talking points but as places he’s actually been, trails he’s actually run.

That personal connection matters for the policy argument too. Idaho’s public land footprint, roughly 60% of the state’s total land area, isn’t just a recreational asset. It’s a talent retention and attraction engine that’s genuinely difficult to quantify but impossible to dismiss. “The public lands are the thing that are driving people to be here, to either move here or to stay here,” Petzke said. “If you think about what’s unique about Idaho, none of the great things we have are truly unique in the country, with the exception of public lands.”

The Frank Church alone illustrates the point: 2.4 million acres of roadless terrain, 2,600 miles of trails, 370-plus animal species, and access so remote that your three options for getting in are flying, floating, or walking. There’s nothing else like it in the lower 48.

How the Federal Land Sale Fight Unfolded

The proposal that nearly became law last year didn’t come out of nowhere. The ideological current running beneath it, sometimes called the Sagebrush Rebellion, has surfaced periodically since the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 established that the United States would hold its remaining public lands in perpetuity. What made last summer different was the vehicle: budget reconciliation, a legislative mechanism that moves fast and is difficult to stop.

The sequence, as Fasciano explained it, started modestly: a House proposal targeting roughly half a million acres, primarily in Nevada. It escalated significantly when Senator Mike Lee of Utah put forward language that would have mandated disposal of somewhere between two and three million acres across eleven western states, including Idaho. The argument was partly fiscal, partly ideological — a long-standing position that the federal government doesn’t have the right to hold these lands indefinitely, and that states and private owners would manage them more productively.

What the proposal’s architects apparently underestimated was the breadth and intensity of the opposition. Senator Jim Rish’s office reportedly received more constituent communications about this issue than any other in the office’s history. Republican legislators from western states who might otherwise have let the freight train of a major reconciliation package roll through drew lines instead. Senator Rish and Senator Crapo were publicly and forcefully opposed. Congressman Mike Simpson, a longtime public lands advocate, was vocal from the House side.

“The group of people who do want public lands to be sold off is so tiny and so clearly self-interested that it’s not a constituency that’s worth listening to,” Petzke said. Polling conducted during the fight showed 85 to 90 percent support for keeping public lands in public hands, cutting across political lines in ways that surprised even some observers who thought they understood the issue.

The proposal was ultimately stripped from the reconciliation package, but Fasciano was careful about how much comfort to take from that outcome. “It went down to the wire. It felt like it could go either way right up until the last minute.” The underlying pressures haven’t gone away, and the process for disposing of federal lands in smaller increments remains in place. This issue will come back.

The Quieter Threat: Idaho’s State Endowment Lands

While the federal fight drew national attention, Petzke spent part of this legislative session working on a challenge that’s closer to home and in some ways harder to solve: Idaho’s 2.5 million acres of state endowment lands.

These lands were transferred to Idaho at statehood in the late 1800s, with a constitutional mandate to generate revenue for the benefit of public schools. Five constitutional officers, the governor, attorney general, superintendent of public instruction, controller, and secretary of state, sit on the land board that manages them. And unlike federal public lands, there is very little restriction on when or whether they can be sold. The board’s mandate is to maximize financial return for the beneficiaries. That’s it.

The math on some of these parcels is uncomfortable to contemplate. Petzke cited Payette Lake near McCall as the clearest example: the state endowment owns roughly 60% of the lakefront. Current estimates put that land’s development value somewhere between $200 and $300 million. Under the existing constitutional mandate, a future land board with a different philosophy could make a rational financial argument for selling it.

Petzke co-sponsored a constitutional amendment this session that would have added recreational and public access value as a factor the land board must consider alongside financial return — not instead of it, but alongside it. The timber industry, which has a favorable arrangement under the current framework, pushed back hard even though the amendment’s language specifically preserved timber revenue as the first priority. The amendment died on a tie vote in committee.

“I am very thankful that we have great land board members right now who don’t see it that way,” Petzke said. “But I would like to make sure that in our constitution it says that if we did ever have a change in the land board, they couldn’t go down that road.”

He plans to try again next session with simpler, cleaner language. The clock on constitutional amendments reset when the first attempt failed, so the path is open.

The Trail Funding Gap Nobody Has Solved Yet

One of the more practical legislative threads in the conversation was Petzke’s ongoing effort to create a funding mechanism for non-motorized trail maintenance. Idaho has a genuinely successful model for motorized trails: OHV and snowmobile stickers fund a maintenance program that runs on eight to ten million dollars a year and keeps those trails in solid shape. The equivalent program for hiking, backpacking, and horseback trails doesn’t exist.

The challenge is structural. You can’t put a sticker on a hiking boot. The users who benefit from non-motorized trails are diffuse, their equipment isn’t registered, and any fee mechanism requires charging people who currently expect free access to public land. Every option Petzke has floated has run into the same wall: colleagues who have pledged never to support new fees.

His current thinking is that general fund appropriations may be the only realistic path, since the benefit is effectively universal. He also floated raising the state parks passport, currently $10 annually, which is dramatically below comparable programs in neighboring states. The political environment this past session, dominated by budget pressures and fee aversion, made it the wrong year to push it. He’s not giving up.

The through-line across both public lands episodes is the same one that runs through the transportation and education conversations Ahlquist has been having all year: the problems are real, the solutions require sustained attention across multiple legislative sessions, and the window to act before the situation gets significantly harder is narrowing. Idaho’s public lands are genuinely at risk — not necessarily from a single dramatic vote, but from the slow accumulation of decisions made without a clear, shared commitment to keeping them public and accessible.

As Petzke put it near the end of the conversation: “Every so often you get somebody who wants to sell it all off. It’s important that we are ready for that when it comes.”

Representative James Petzke represents District 21 in Meridian. Learn more at PetzkeforIdaho.com. The Idaho Wildlife Federation can be found at IdahoWildlife.org.