Not So Slick, Rick

The bigger scandal is that land swaps are even permitted at all in this country.

As it turns out, most laws governing land in Arizona originate from the era when the government sought to encourage development and settle the West.

So, if a developer wants to get his hands on a piece of federal land, all he has to do is suggest another piece of land he can trade for it — and get Congress to sign off on the exchange.

That sort of deal-making may have made sense 50 years ago, when the feds owned huge chunks of the state and the rest was wide open. But times have changed: Arizona is the fastest-growing state in the union.

We can barely handle our growth as it is. We don't need to swap land to entice more development.

Every time the Legislature puts a proposition on the ballot to allow state trust land to be swapped for development, we've voted it down. Arizona voters rejected swap plans in 1990, in 1992, in 1994, in 2000, in 2002, and again in 2004.

You'd think they'd get the hint: We want to keep our public lands.

But when it comes to federal law, it doesn't matter what we want — not when people like Rick Renzi represent us in Washington, and not when we're easily distracted by the mere mention of pedophiles.

So, the feds still allow land swaps, and allow them under archaic rules that favor politically connected insiders.

Janine Blaeloch is director of the Seattle-based Western Lands Project, a watchdog group critical of land swaps. She says the Renzi deal is par for the course. She tells me that swaps can even make it through Congress without an explicit statement of which parcels are involved. It's the government version of a "player to be named later" — and you know that developers aren't throwing in the geographical equivalent of A-Rod after the fact.

"The developers usually come out of these trades just fine," Blaeloch says. "It's the public that gets taken to the cleaners."

The deals are supposed to include appraisals showing that the pieces being swapped have equivalent value, but there's a long history of corruption on that front. An audit released in 2000 by the federal Government Accountability Office found that taxpayers had been screwed out of hundreds of millions of dollars in unequal trades.

In one odious deal, the feds gave away 3,500 acres of pristine desert to a company building a dump. In exchange, we the people got land along the rail line used to transport the trash. Nice.

The shenanigans didn't stop with that report. In 2003, an Interior Department audit found that federal employees in Utah helped conceal the true value of land in various swaps by $100 million.

Arizona isn't immune. Take the deal in which mega-developer Don Diamond "donated" 632 acres to enlarge Saguaro National Park near Tucson. In exchange, he got a staggering 4,332 acres outside Phoenix.

I don't care how nice those 632 acres were. That just doesn't compute.

For years, we've known the solution. If the feds want to sell excess public land, they should do it at auction. And if someone wants to sell acreage to the government, they should do it in an independent transaction. Fair market value would at least have a chance.

But no one in Washington has the political will for reform. Republicans and Democrats alike would rather cash in than crack down.

Consider the swap entangling Rick Renzi. The five-man investment group that bought Sandlin's land, hoping for a "free pass," includes former Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt.

Babbitt's brother, Paul, was Renzi's Democratic opponent in 2004. Not a year later, Babbitt and his partners inked their deal with the devil.

Of course, all the facts haven't come out yet. We'll need to wait for the grand jury to finish its work before we know whether this swap crossed the line from shady to illegal.

But Democrats making hay over this scandal ought to realize one thing: We don't need to wait for this probe's completion to fix the bigger picture.

As long as land swaps are allowed, there's going to be some schmuck who gets elected to Congress and owes a favor to a developer friend back home.

And if you think that congressman is going to stand up and protect our interests instead of helping his pals, well, Rick Renzi's business partner has some land in Cochise County he'd like to sell you.