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GRAND JUNCTION
The always-radioactive idea of selling off federal land comes and goes from Mesa County and the environs, where 3 out of every 4 square feet of the high desert is owned by a government. Biting off a piece of forlorn pasture next to a highway exit for an apartment building may be controversial, though it has been done.
But when the proposals started flying this month for everything from selling the popular Lunch Loops bike trails, to plunking 150,000 new residents down onto a no-rules “Freedom City” of the sage, the tech-bro think tanks floating the edgy concepts are finding that the practical folks of the Western Slope have a few questions.
“Does the word ‘water’ mean anything to you?”
“Did you hear the one about Exxon in 1981 and the envisioned shining city of 1.75 million people centered on sleepy Battlement Mesa? Current population 5,402?”
“Have you stepped outside lately?”
Reaction to various federal sell-off proposals was so swift and politically charged last week that Congress was issuing new rewrites before advocacy groups had hit “Send” on their e-mail protests. By midweek, the most radical GOP land sales were off the table.
LEFT: The community of Battlement Mesa along I-70 and the Colorado River on Colorado’s Western Slope in this 2023 file photo. RIGHT: Mountain bikers traverse the Lunch Loops trail system near Grand Junction. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Yet conservative momentum remains for one subset of the federal land disposal ideas: Creating unfettered development zones on federal land, being pushed by nonprofits like American Enterprise Institute, Freedom Cities, Charter Cities Institute and others. While freedom cities remain a puzzle to many people west of the Continental Divide, President Donald Trump campaigned on the concept, and some of the billionaire investors intrigued by rules-free zones have the ear of Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and other key administration influencers.
The sell-off debate came amid yet more once-unthinkable executive moves by Trump agencies to spur private economic development on previously protected federal property. The agriculture secretary announced Monday the administration would reverse a 24-year-old “roadless” rule that protected millions of Forest Service acres in the West from timber cutting and other resource extraction.
Intense reactions to seemingly unlikely scenarios are understandable — and politically effective — when assessing a new federal administration apparently committed to sweeping change, Colorado advocates and local officials said.
“You can’t predict what this administration is going to do or how they make decisions, without solid statistics and evidence, so it’s hard to say what might happen,” Pitkin County Commissioner Francie Jacober said.
A whiplash of ideas and critiques
Assessments of the new federal direction from across Colorado took many forms, though bewilderment was a common theme.
“I happen to be familiar with the lands on the map that they seem to think are ready to welcome tens and tens of thousands of new residents, and perhaps these folks should get away from their desks for a bit?” said Pete Kolbenschlag, a Western Slope advocate for sustainable farming and local cooperation.
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SUBSCRIBE“It just doesn’t make sense when it’s held up against reality. These ideas touch on many complex, deeply and long-adjudicated issues. Land use and water, for instance, are not minor matters in Colorado politics,” Kolbenschlag said.
What keeps Western Slope community leaders from laughing at ideas they consider laughable is the knowledge that the backers of a broad federal sell-off in the West now sit at the political controls. And the prospects for newly privatized federal land benefit from a new twist: support from tech multi-billionaires with means to build at city-scale.
The proposed overhaul of federal holdings comes in two primary forms. The most sweeping, and most serious, push is from conservative budget writers in the Senate, who at least through the beginning of last week were pitching the mandatory sell-off of a percentage of federal parcels, to slim down government while promoting affordable housing and other economic development.
The Outdoor Alliance, a coalition of 10 outdoor recreation advocacy groups, last week published a map that argued nearly 300 million acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management Land could be open for sale under one U.S. Senate budget plan. The map included more than 14 million acres in Colorado; all the federally managed land deemed “multiple-use.” (The Senate plan said the government could not sell national conservation areas, national recreation areas, national monuments, national parks or wilderness areas.)
As the legislation was originally written, “all of this could be for sale,” said Tania Lown-Hecht, the head of communications for the alliance, pointing out a map that includes several popular outdoor recreation destinations in Colorado. The spots included eye-opening headliners like Hartman Rocks in Gunnison, Lunch Loops in Grand Junction, swaths of the Grand Mesa, and thousands of acres around Twin Lakes near Leadville in the Sawatch Range.
The other primary push, now rising to the level of special study sessions among Western Slope county commissioners and calls for research by local government staff, is for “freedom cities” carved from massive federal holdings.
LEFT: Donald Trump campaigns in Grand Junction in 2016. RIGHT: Grand Junction, seen in this 2023 file photo, sits next to a large swath of desert that has been identified as a possible site for a freedom city. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)
The Freedom Cities Coalition, backed by titans of the tech industry and venture capital, including Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen and Sam Altman, recommends turning about 155 square miles of desert lands north of Grand Junction and Fruita into a city of 370,000 people. The maps of potential freedom cities in the middle of large federal holdings also include an area west of Montrose. The cities would promote innovation in nuclear energy, data centers, biotech, defense and space exploration.
Trump called for the construction of 10 of these cities while he was campaigning, and included their creation as a plank in the GOP platform. The cities are envisioned as tech hubs that would operate outside the normal legal state and federal legal framework.
A draft Freedom Cities Act circulating in Washington, D.C., notes that Congress has the constitutional power to “provide for the common defence (sic), promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty for all Americans.” The act cites the authority of the 1906 Antiquities Act for allowing the creation of federal enclaves on federal lands.
The act specifies the lands would not be sold to private developers; instead, they would have 99-year leases. The draft also calls for “self-regulation” of the cities under the oversight of a board. Residents would have the right to vote on issues within their new cities. Drafts specify that federal law would not apply the same way inside a freedom city as it does outside. It calls the cities “test beds for new approaches to regulation.”
Freedom or “charter” city advocates repeatedly mention specific government-regulated areas where they believe American innovation and growth have stagnated because of well-meaning but excessive layers of bureaucratic review. Lack of affordable housing and the difficulty of building new electrical power generation are two of their frequent topics.
“We’re seeing a lot of challenges with meeting the energy demands of AI, and many of those challenges stem from regulations that make it more difficult to build power plants, to build energy lines, to build nuclear,” said Mark Lutter, co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit Charter Cities Institute, which has been working with others to further the concept. “So can we carve out an area and say, look, let’s cut away the red tape. Let’s figure out what innovative structure still protects people’s safety, but might be able to expedite these new technologies a little bit more effectively.”
Both prongs of the sell-off approach are prompting scathing early reviews from many Colorado civic and nonprofit leaders.
“This harebrained notion is probably just a pipe dream, but this is corporate extremism at its worst,” said Alli Henderson, southern Rockies director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Not only are tech oligarchs demanding to be subsidized with public lands, they want to take immensely popular landscapes that are vital for Colorado’s outdoor recreation and economic prosperity. Both ideas are incredibly unpopular. Public lands are not for sale, and our public health and safety cannot be sacrificed to corporate overlords.”
40 to 50 ideal sites for Freedom Cities in the West
Western Slope political leaders are gauging how much time to spend on ambitious yet vague proposals they’ve heard more about from magazine articles and bloggers than in direct talks.
“No one knows how serious this is going to be,” Grand Junction City Councilman Scott Beilfuss said.
The city council took its first official action June 18 regarding freedom city proposals and the separate idea that recreational lands adjacent to Grand Junction could be sold. The council directed city staff to investigate the possibilities and report back.
Beilfuss likened the freedom city concept being proposed for north of Grand Junction to the oil shale boom of the late 1970s. The Exxon Oil Company’s Colony Oil Shale Project promised to bring 1.75 million people to the Grand Valley and surrounding counties to help process shale rock into oil.
Workers flocked to the area before that project went bust in 1982. Mesa County and neighboring Garfield County lost 24,000 residents in the aftermath. But Exxon did leave behind the company town of Battlement Mesa that exists today, mainly as a golf course-centered retirement community.
Beilfuss pointed out that the land proposed for a freedom city would not have enough water available and that the heavy clay desert ground would be expensive to build on because it is unstable.
Grand Junction City Councilman Scott Beilfuss talks in the desert north of the city, a vast tract that was one of 40 to 50 sites in the West identified for a potential freedom city location. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)“Water will be the deal-breaker,” Beilfuss said.
The Grand Valley Outdoor Recreation Coalition has put its members on alert and asked them to contact their representatives and oppose any land sell-offs in the Grand Valley.
The freedom cities proposal has the potential to carve out some of the popular 18 Road mountain bike trails on BLM lands north of Grand Junction.
“Mesa County relies on public lands to drive our economy and sustain the outdoor lifestyle that is central to our community’s identity. Without access to trails and open spaces, far fewer people would choose to live, work or visit here. These lands are essential — not just for recreation, but for local businesses, healthy ecosystems, and future generations,” said Chandler Smith, executive director of the Grand Valley Outdoor Recreation Coalition.
Smith added, “for years, Colorado communities have partnered with the federal government to protect and enhance these public resources. Selling them off for private gain would undo that progress and deliver a serious blow to our economy.”
The vague freedom city plan for Colorado — crafted by organizations that seem unaware of complicated local land use planning and even thornier water issues — was dashed by wording in the Senate budget reconciliation bill that excluded the sale of federal land with grazing rights. The American Enterprise Institute, the D.C.-based free-market think tank that last year floated the freedom city proposal on BLM land near existing development, concluded that none of the possible 21 freedom city locations it had identified in Colorado worked due to existing leases for grazing.
“We have determined that the opportunity for freedom cities in Colorado is nil,” said Edward Pinto, the co-director of the housing program at the American Enterprise Institute.
The institute identified about 40 to 50 ideal freedom city sites in the West, with dense housing on at least 10 square miles of federal land near existing infrastructure and development. In a stump speech in 2023, Trump announced plans to hold a contest to “charter up to 10 new freedom cities” on less than 0.5% of federal land.
“These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite the American imagination and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people … a new shot at home ownership and in fact the American dream,” Trump said.
The video announcement triggered a swarm of free-market calls for “startup cities.”
Democrats and Republicans across Colorado have come together to say our public lands are not for sale.
— Sen. Michael Bennet
The American Enterprise Institute determined that dense communities, with a 50% reduction of average lot sizes, on 0.3% of BLM land — about 850 square miles — could add more than 1.5 million homes near existing cities in the West.
Building more densely — even without public lands — could add 33,000 to 41,000 more homes a year in Colorado, Pinto said. Adjusting zoning to allow greater density, he said, would “keep Colorado from turning into California and allow your children and grandchildren to live in the same state as you.”
“There are plenty of options for Colorado to fix its housing problem,” Pinto said. “It’s a question of political will.”
A spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, also running for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2026, said Bennet hasn’t yet seen a proposal for “freedom cities,” but that he’s a hard “no,” since he opposes any sell-off of federal lands.
“Colorado’s public lands are the foundation of our economy and represent treasured parts of our culture, our geography, and our history. The last thing we should do is auction off the inheritance of our children and grandchildren,” Bennet said, in an email. “Democrats and Republicans across Colorado have come together to say our public lands are not for sale.”
The proposals make for very strange bedfellows
The sell-off idea can be toxic to so many voters that even Colorado Republicans ordinarily aligned with the current conservative majority carefully avoid sweeping endorsements of federal land disposal.
Colorado U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd is a Grand Junction Republican and first-time politician whose 3rd Congressional District spans more than 10 million acres of public lands. He voted against a separate public lands sale proposal focused on acreage in Nevada and Utah in the House Natural Resources Committee and ultimately, the U.S. House removed the public lands proposal from its budget reconciliation bill.
A spokesperson for Hurd — who last month came out in support of the Gunnison Outdoor Resources Protection Act that actually increases protections for 730,000 acres of public lands in the Gunnison River Basin — said the congressman is urging senators to pay attention to the specifics of the House budget bill.
“Congressman Hurd is closely following any changes to the House-passed, Trump-monikered Big Beautiful Bill. He encourages the Senate to send back legislation the House will be able to pass, sticking as close as possible to the carefully worked reconciliation text,” spokesperson Nick Bayer said.
Political breezes blowing through the heady open space ideas quickly turn into advocacy storms. Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who has added changing versions of sell-off proposals into the budget reconciliation bill currently moving through Senate committees, on Tuesday announced he was pulling all U.S. Forest Service lands from sell-off lists.
“We are NOT selling off our forests,” Lee said in a message posted on X. Also, he said, his revisions would “SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE the amount of BLM land in the bill. Only land WITHIN 5 MILES of population centers is eligible.”
Lee’s message did say, though, that he would still try to establish “FREEDOM ZONES to ensure these lands benefit AMERICAN FAMILIES.”
Meanwhile, the Senate parliamentarian, a neutral official who passes technical judgment on how legislation can move forward, said last week that Lee’s earlier proposals could not be included in a reconciliation bill that only requires a majority to pass. Such a big policy change would require a filibuster-proof supermajority of 60 votes, the parliamentarian said, under the longstanding “Byrd Rule” named after West Virginia’s late Senate procedural whiz Robert C. Byrd.
People camp in the desert north of Grand Junction. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)Seeing even some Republican lawmakers backing away from sell-off proposals, supporters of “charter” or “freedom” city concepts are campaigning to dispel the more dystopian takes on what they support. They say they are not advocating for lawless authoritarian compounds free of all regulation, created without public review.
“The U.S. has a lot of federal land, and some of it is not being used very well and can be repurposed,” said Lutter, whose Charter Cities Institute advocates for and provides technical assistance to planners. “Do we want to sell Yellowstone? No.”
Charter Cities cites successful past new-city developments outside established metro areas, such as Columbia, Maryland, and Reston, Virginia, both starting as planned communities well away from Washington, D.C. Venture capitalists like Thiel and Andreesen have backed investors building a controversial enterprise zone carved out of Honduras, Wired magazine and others have reported.
One important component of successful charter city planning is multiple layers of veto power, Lutter said. If Congress authorizes a charter cities concept on federal land, he said, the veto layers for plans objectionable to Colorado could include Gov. Jared Polis, for example.
If Polis said, “‘Oh no, this proposal strikes me as bad. I don’t trust these guys.’ Whatever. He gets to veto it,” Lutter said. “I understand the concern about making sure that you’re not creating areas that are not respecting rights, that have a kind of anarchy.”
Veto layers for ideas like unfettered drone deliveries could include the federal Department of Transportation and other agencies as well, he added.
Colorado mountain counties working on plans to take control
Freedom cities may make for a good slide-deck pitch, but the devil is in the fine print of thousands of pages of federal, state and local regulations, says University of Houston Law Center Professor Kellen Zale, who has studied the fate of millions of acres of private inholding surrounded by federal land.
If public lands are sold to private developers planning homes, much of the land would default to control of local counties, with some acreage in municipal control.
In Colorado, where local control is a foundational pillar of reviewing any development proposals, development of inholdings surrounded by public land is an exhaustive process. For example, the Florida developers proposing 19 luxury homes on a private 680-acre parcel above Edwards in the Eagle River Valley have spent more than a decade navigating local and Forest Service approvals for access. And that plan, which is mired in lawsuits, has yet to undergo specific planning and construction approvals.
If federal land is sold to developers, it would likely require county zoning, which would involve an overhaul of local land use codes, a process that typically requires years in Colorado. (Most counties do not zone federal lands for specific uses other than forestry and federal management.) When a developer does identify a project on an inholding inside federal land boundaries, local approvals kick in around roads, infrastructure and water. Two words best describe the process of developing anything on inholdings, Zale said: complex and long.
Pitkin County’s planning commission in July will consider a plan to impose a strict zoning designation on more than half a million federal acres in the county. The Pitkin County Resource – Government (RS-G) zoning designation has existed for nearly 20 years but it has not officially been applied to any acreage.
Privatization, whether the land is developed or not, is a very troubling path.
— Kellen Zale, University of Houston Law Center Professor
The new plan would be to apply the RS-G zoning district to all federal lands in the county, which would require anyone wanting to build on that acreage to direct all plans through Pitkin County’s intensive local planning and approval process. The upshot: It would be next to impossible to build anything big on those lands.
The idea is to better protect rural and public lands, said Pitkin County’s assistant manager Kara Silbernagel.
“This is about rural preservation and how essential public lands are to our economy and our community,” she said.
Jacober, the Pitkin County commissioner, said the county simply doesn’t have the “next-to-urban area (the feds) are really talking about,” though, and “there aren’t as many sites around here as the threats would make you think.”
Even when the government does sell public land for housing, nothing happens quickly. Summit County in 2014 persuaded Congress to let the Forest Service sell a 45-acre parcel on Dillon Reservoir to the county for workforce housing outside Frisco. After nearly a decade of impact studies and review, the Lake Hill parcel remains undeveloped as the county considers rezoning and water needs for the parcel.
There are even more significant hurdles than local regulations when it comes to selling land owned by all Americans, Zale said.
“Even if a local government determines that these lands are not suitable for built development, once it’s sold, there are big-picture issues about selling land that belongs to everyone,” Zale said. “I don’t want to say it’s irreversible, but privatization, whether the land is developed or not, is a very troubling path.”
Kevin Bommer, executive director of the Colorado Municipal League, said state law is very clear about the incorporation of municipalities. So, the idea of new cities springing up on federal lands “is hard to imagine.”
With a variety of trails and camp sites the North Fruita Desert bike trails are an attraction popular with both locals and tourists. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)“It’s a novel concept. But I’m not sure I understand it,” he said. “State and federal laws can’t just be waved away.”
Bommer cited last year’s incorporation of Colorado’s newest municipality, Keystone. It took several years to go through the process of establishing rules and regulations after many years of discussion.
Colorado has shown it is serious about making use of unused public lands since Polis promoted, and the legislature passed, House Bill 1319 in 2019, a law that requires each state agency and institution of higher education to identify undeveloped lands that would be suitable to be leased or sold, primarily for affordable housing.
The state’s current projects include Colorado Department of Transportation land in Steamboat Springs that will be used for an early childhood education center; a parking lot at the governor’s mansion that can be developed for affordable housing; and a Colorado Department of Human Services parcel on Lookout Mountain that is also suitable for affordable housing.
Bommer said it is complicated to make these small transfers work, and the only way he could see an entire freedom city happening on federal lands is if it was close enough to a municipality to tie into existing infrastructure. He said any such land transfers would require a lengthy, laborious process.
Mesa County is an example of that. Earlier this year, Mesa County was finally cleared — after five years of work — to buy about 31 acres of BLM land near Clifton that has no public access, or recreation or conservation value. Its planned use is for economic development.
It’s not just backpackers, skiers and bikers who need defending in debating any public lands sell-off, said Amy Mitchell, a Park County commissioner who lives on a private land inholding in the Pike National Forest. Mitchell considers herself “a caretaker of the animals as well as the people.”
Any transfer of federal parcels for housing wouldn’t have a big impact in largely rural Park County, Mitchell said, but “it would cut up some pretty important migration corridors for elk, deer and other area wildlife.”
The theories of unintended consequences reach even deeper into Colorado’s open spaces and working ranch and farmlands, noted Jay Fetcher, a rancher in Routt County who helped form the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust. He said major transfers of public lands to private business would be terrible not only for wildlife and viewsheds, but also for the ranchers across the state who have voluntarily converted more than 800,000 acres of ranch land into conservation easements since its establishment in 1995.
“Here we have made a perpetual commitment with our land never to develop it,” Fetcher said, “and yet if those who want it get their way to sell off those lands next to us, then all of a sudden we would have golf courses and condominiums next to these pristine easements.”
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