Selling off Colorado: Tech bros and conservatives have grand plans for federal lands
But does anybody who lives here actually like the idea of trading U.S. forests for apartments, or high-desert mesas for “freedom cities”?
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.
