There's a lot more to those land swaps than the public is generally told.
Consolidation of ownership does make a certain amount of sense, the question is the price paid. The Lochsa land swap proposal was a bad deal, a speculative buy of railroad checkerboard by Tim Blixseth (one of his entities, anyway) with the hopes and plans of a big trade at bigger profit, basically well-above-market.
I don't have a problem with FMV swaps, but when 300 buck an acre mowed off garbage goes to "the public" for 1,400 dollars and above -- that's plain wrong.
And it's also wrong for the megabuck players out there to propose swaps that just consolidate the "kings' forest" kind of arrangements -- that's what drove the Wyoming deal, a desire for raw advantage.
