This Land Is His Land
Jerry Patterson is a concealed-weapon-carrying, tobacco-dipping, canvas-death-trap-flying maverick whose management of the Christmas Mountains has ticked off everyone from Rick Perry to the Sierra Club. Not that he cares.
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This, of course, is the burning question, but over the course of several conversations with Patterson, it became clear that his overriding concern was less with the question of private or public ownership than with the prohibition against hunting and firearms.
“I am still sticking to ‘no guns, no hunting, no deal,’” he told me as we hiked in the national park. “The only reason I offered it to [the NPS] earlier was because I wasn’t aware of their gun and hunting policy. It is the principle of the thing. I definitely have an agenda here. But in this case the agenda I am pursuing is not hurting anybody. If this was going to be a park and I was keeping it out of public hands, that would be a different story. But I am not hurting anybody. I am making a point, but I am not hurting anybody.”
I asked him if he had any regrets about his role in the political fight that had erupted. “Only one,” he said. “I screwed up when I said that the provision in the gift deed was not legally enforceable. It sounded like I was defying the Conservation Fund. I wasn’t. I was just saying that I could legally do so. What I should have said was that once I had a deal I was planning to present it to the Conservation Fund. Without a deal, how can they know if they approve it or not?”
Patterson pointed out that, contrary to what almost all the stories written about the Christmas Mountains had reported, the Conservation Fund did not stipulate that the land be sold only to the NPS or Texas Parks and Wildlife. It did allow for sale to a third party, but only with its permission. I asked if he actually would have worked with the Conservation Fund to modify a private deal. Patterson thought a moment before responding in a way that would have amazed just about anyone familiar with the dispute. “Sure,” he said.
In the eyes of many in the environmental community, the Christmas Mountains sale was not an isolated event but fit into a larger pattern of behavior. Patterson, it was said, had done this sort of thing before. After five years in office, in fact, he had acquired a reputation in some quarters as a concealed-weapon-wieldin’, tobacco-dippin’, NRA-supportin’, libertarian yahoo bent on selling off Texas’s precious public lands to private developers. He has been far more aggressive than his predecessors at the GLO. During his tenure the volume of land office business has skyrocketed, driven in part by transactions like his $100 million investment in a Wal-Mart distribution facility in Baytown that is projected to earn the state $239 million. GLO direct investment in real estate and in real estate funds—expanded powers that Patterson lobbied for and got—has climbed from almost nothing to $500 million and $1.3 billion, respectively. He nearly doubled the number of home loans made to veterans in the 2004 fiscal year, to a record $1 billion, and has matched or exceeded $1 billion in low-interest loans each year since.
But the land deals have led to clashes with conservationists and environmentalists. In 2005 the GLO bought a two-thousand-acre parcel of land in Tarrant County as an investment, only to run into another controversy when several environmental groups announced that they considered it priceless original prairie land. “The GLO does not have any controls in place or any ecological assessments when they do their real estate speculation,” says Jarid Manos, the chief executive officer of the Great Plains Restoration Council. “After the initial protest, the GLO has agreed to work with us toward a conservation alternative,” though he adds that the property remains in limbo.
On South Padre Island, Patterson defied a major campaign by the Sierra Club to stop gas drilling in the National Seashore in order to protect Kemp’s ridley sea turtles. Patterson’s position was simple: Drilling had been done there since 1951, the GLO owned full mineral rights, and no turtles would be harmed. A federal court later upheld him.
Sometimes Patterson’s critics seem to misunderstand his intentions. In 2003 he drew bitter protest in West Texas when he announced that he was exploring the possibility of leasing water rights on 355,000 acres of state land to a private company called Rio Nuevo. He was accused of proceeding with a plan that could effectively pump part of West Texas dry. The reality was that Patterson, typically heedless of how politically incorrect his actions might appear, was simply probing for new revenue sources and trying to make sure that, if everyone else was going to pump groundwater, the state got its share. He ended up greatly tightening environmental restrictions on pumping water from PSF lands and insisting on state ownership of the water—so much so that Rio Nuevo has not recently pursued negotiations on the lease offered by the GLO. Patterson says he is still open to doing a water-leasing deal and will still not be likely to care much what other people think.
Similarly, in 2005, the GLO was assigned to sell four hundred acres of state parkland in Tarrant County. Locals wanted all the land preserved as a park, while Patterson initially wanted to preserve a portion as a park and sell a portion to developers. This led to the accusation, from Douglas Brinkley, that the land commissioner was trying “to scrap Wild Texas for cash.” But Brinkley’s assertion was news to state representative Charlie Geren, the main force behind the ultimately successful coalition put together to buy the land for use as a park. “Jerry Patterson played a big role in seeing that this piece of property stayed a park,” he says. “He worked very hard with us and even when he was catching hell from a lot of people held tight while we put together the money to buy it.”
Though it is difficult to characterize these often complex deals, it is true that Patterson proceeds with little regard for environmentalists and other advocacy groups. He is fully aware that this has not helped public perceptions of him. “It has all become an example of this image of me as a greedy person selling land to private people, and I am sure it will be an issue in the next election,” says Patterson with a shrug. “I am looking forward to that. In fact, it makes me want to run again as land commissioner. Candidly, you reach a point where you tell somebody the truth enough times, and they keep saying things that are factually inaccurate, where the only thing you can conclude is that they are lying.”
When you think you are fighting liars, of course, it is easy to ignore all the bad things they say about you.
By the end of January, the frenzy of activity aimed at preventing the GLO from selling the Christmas Mountains to either Poindexter or the Craddocks had produced a radical plan of action. The strategy hatched by the Conservation Fund was to raise private funds, buy the land again (recall that the Conservation Fund had given it to Texas in the first place), and then donate it to Big Bend National Park.
“In my twenty-five-year career in land conservation, protecting six million acres in fifty states, I have never experienced a state attempting to sell gifted property,” the Conservation Fund’s Larry Selzer told me. “As distasteful as it may be to in effect buy the property twice, I think we have to keep our eye on the prize, which is a strong and vibrant land conservation community in Texas.”
That campaign resulted in a thirteen-page proposal by the NPS that was delivered to the GLO on January 31. It outlined a plan to purchase the tract (with third-party money), transfer it to Big Bend National Park as backcountry, and explore the feasibility of constructing a hiking trail. On the obviously critical issue of hunting, the report stated, “while it would be technically possible to provide a hunting opportunity in the Christmas Mountains, it would be extremely expensive and of limited benefit to the public. We would not support hunting in the Christmas Mountains if the NPS acquires the property.” Still, the report was optimistic, and it seemed that the Conservation Fund would be able to find the money. A February 2 story in the Austin American-Statesman expressed confidence that the NPS would get the land.
Which is why what happened at the School Land Board’s February 5 meeting was so completely unexpected. The three board members began by voting unanimously not to accept the bids of either Poindexter or the Craddocks. There would be no private deal. You could hear the murmuring in the room. If there was no private deal, then the NPS proposal would very likely be approved. Except that next came a weird and apparently unforeseen protocol problem that enabled the board to prevent the NPS proposal from being discussed at all. The meeting was adjourned with no resolution. Reporters rushed to the front of the room in an attempt to figure out what had just transpired.
Patterson had outmaneuvered the land conservation lobby yet again. Despite the confidence of the American-Statesman (and a host of other observers) that the NPS plan would succeed, Patterson’s position on hunting and firearms had not changed one iota. Before the board meeting, he’d told me, “The idea of the Conservation Fund coming up with the money to buy it twice and protect land that has already been protected is just dumber than a doorknob. It is just not happening.”
At a press conference a few hours after the meeting, he announced that he was keeping the Christmas Mountains and that he was placing the NPS proposal in semipermanent limbo: It would not be discussed by the board anytime soon. When I spoke with Patterson later that day, he tried to explain his remarkable about-face on the issue of private ownership. He had gone to private bidders last year, he said, only after the state and national park people had turned him down. Now, with the reemergence of the NPS as a bidder, he had decided to explore his federal options. These included a change in NPS rules to allow visitors to hunt and carry weapons as well as offering the land to other federal agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service, that currently allow hunting. In a letter to the superintendent of Big Bend National Park on March 28, he affirmed his insistence that the land be used for hunting and suggested that the NPS could designate the mountains as a huntable national preserve. “I will seek the federal government’s appropriation to purchase the land,” he said. “I will go to Congress and lobby the Texas delegation to come up with the appraised value and buy it out of federal revenue.”
Like most everything else in the Christmas Mountains deal, this was an outcome that Patterson’s opponents did not like. He had managed to not sell to private interests while still denying the public land advocates what they really wanted.
What does Patterson think about all this? “I think what happened was what in the Legislature we call a lobby fight,” he says. “It is about winning, not about what you wanted to do at the outset. It is about defeating the other party.” He was referring to what his opponents were trying to do. But he might as well have been talking about himself.
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