BLM “Losing a Lot of Great People?” Why Not Move West?
E&E News has a big story out where a bunch of bureaucrats and Obama Administration alumni are fretting that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is "losing a lot of great people." Why? Because President Trump wants to move the jobs back out West, and apparently the bureaucrats don't want to do it.
...it appears likely that many D.C.-based employees have no intention to relocate to Colorado or eight other state offices in Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming. More than 200 positions are slated to move as part of the relocation plan announced in July.Some BLM divisions will be left with only a handful of employees who agree to move, sources said.
Oh. So a bunch of bureaucrats who oversee a bunch of land out West, don't want to move out West to be closer to the land they actually oversee? Well, if you don't love the West, why should we let you run it?
Thanks to Al Jones in Billings for sharing that story with us. Al notes that the city of Billings already has a decent sized Department of Interior building housing several employees, and would welcome even more. He also takes issue with the "inside the beltway" view that these types of news stories seem to portray.
Al writes:
...only people who live there are smart and experienced enough to run millions of acres they’ve never seen from thousands of miles away.
It also ignores that a federal salary in DC/Maryland/Northern Virginia doesn’t go nearly as far as it does in Grand Junction (my mining engineer uncle lived there, his kids still do) so recruiting would be easier there as would retention instead of jumping ship to make the Beltway mortgage payments.
And, while we're at it- on top of moving some of these DC-based federal jobs back West, why don't we also start moving some of these state government jobs elsewhere across Montana?
Maybe we could scatter Montana’s State Government employees more out of Last Chance Gulch to increase the hiring pool (very tiny now) by placing them amongst the people and places they serve?