Lands bills for Clark and Washoe counties passed out of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday, clearing a key procedural hurdle as the time for full Senate passage dwindles. 

The two bills, which would expand the amount of land available for development in each county and add permanent conservation protections for millions of acres of wilderness, were each introduced this year. 

The committee votes are the first marker of how senators feel about the bills. The Washoe lands bill passed 10-9, on a party-line vote, while the Clark bill was a more bipartisan endeavor, passing 13-6. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Steve Daines (R-MT) joined all Democrats to advance the measure.

Now out of committee, both bills will advance to consideration on the Senate floor. But whether they’ll actually receive a vote is a different question — and unlikely. With a little more than three weeks of session time remaining — and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) top priority being filling judicial vacancies — the odds of a public lands package making it to the floor are slim. 

Oftentimes, senators will try to find a legislative vehicle — such as must-pass packages — to attach their priorities to, but with the short time remaining in the year, opportunities to do so are limited. If not passed by the Senate’s expected recess that begins Dec. 21, both bills will die and need to be reintroduced in the new Congress.

The support of all the committee’s Democrats — and the three Republicans, for the Clark bill — are an indication of how an eventual floor vote might end up.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who teed up both bills at Tuesday’s legislative hearing, re-introduced the Clark County lands bill — or the Southern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act — in June, with tweaks from the 2021 version that stalled out in the 117th Congress. Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) introduced the Truckee Meadows Public Lands Management Act — better known as the Washoe County lands bill — in January, after years of study initiated by local entities’ 2016 request for a new lands bill.

Nevada lands bills, common in the era of the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), have traditionally accommodated growth in the state, where more than 80 percent of the land is federally owned, by compromising between competing desires for development and conservation. 

Each bill would convey parcels of federal land for disposal — some to local government entities for public purposes, some to be sold at auction to developers after public assessment — and add permanent conservation designations to federal acreage that has been determined to have wilderness characteristics, protecting it from extractive uses such as mining and logging. In each, additional land is placed into trust for tribal nations.

“Everything we do in Southern Nevada has to be in consultation with the federal government, because they own most of the land,” Cortez Masto said of the Clark bill during the hearing. “That’s why this was important for us to come together and create this [bill].”

Both have their fair share of supporters and detractors. The Washoe bill is supported by the mayor of Sparks, the Washoe County Commission, the Reno and Sparks Chamber of Commerce and Friends of Nevada Wilderness, among other groups, while the Clark bill counts the Clark County Commission, the Conservation Lands Foundation, Nevada affordable housing developers and Friends of Nevada Wilderness among its backers. 

Both bills have also drawn criticism from some Nevada environmental groups — who find the Clark bill far more objectionable, given that it would permit expanded development toward the California border — and some mining and ranching advocates.

Each also has some technical changes made at the behest of Chair Joe Manchin’s (I-WV) staff. In the Washoe bill, that included removing the provision that puts 85 percent of the profit from land sales in a special account designated for the region.

Rosen, however, introduced legislation to keep any revenue from Nevada lands sales in the state and plans to push for that bill to be included in any public lands package. Manchin is retiring at the end of this year.

Murkowski and Cassidy spoke in favor of the Clark bill, while Sens. John Barrasso (R-WY), the current ranking member of the committee, and Mike Lee (R-UT), the soon-to-be chairman, spoke against it. Barasso also spoke against the Washoe lands bill, taking aim at Nevada’s history of passing these bills on their own, rather than packaging them with other Western states’ needs.

“Former Majority Leader Harry Reid cut special deals like this for Nevada in the past, excluding other public lands states, and Congress should not enact another one of these special type deals when other Western states seek similar legislation,” Barrasso said of the Washoe bill. “If you want to come back and address this from a broader perspective of public lands, then that’s a fine thing.”

But Cassidy, a more moderate voice in the Senate Republican conference, spoke up in favor of the Clark bill on the basis of housing, noting that bills such as Cortez Masto’s are “[one of the] few things we do up here that directly impact the ability to expand housing.”

Lee, as the incoming chairman of the committee, will have jurisdiction over whether these can move forward if re-introduced in the next Congress. Being from neighboring Utah, Lee, a fellow Westerner, is a proponent of freeing up federal land for uses like housing. But he’s also ideologically opposed to public lands and has likened federal land ownership in his state to occupation.

While he said he was “sympathetic” to the need for more housing in the Las Vegas Valley, he opposed the provisions of the bill that would place 2 million acres in the county into permanent conservation status.

“We’ve got to deal with these issues,” Lee said. “But it shouldn’t require us, every time we do it, to lock up even more land in a state that’s already dominated overwhelmingly by federal land managers.”