KVIG Informative

In 1979, Nevada’s Legislature passed a law declaring that nearly all the federal land inside the state’s borders belonged under state control, not Washington’s. The law was never enforced, and the same roughly 86% of Nevada the bill was written for is still managed by the federal government today. Nevada’s congressional delegation is still fighting over pieces of that same land — not to seize it outright anymore, but to sell parts of it off.

The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 settled a question Western ranchers had pressed for decades, declaring that public lands would stay in federal hands rather than pass into private or state ownership, according to the University of Nevada Oral History Program’s account of the state’s Sagebrush Rebellion. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management followed in 1979 by suspending its usual 10-year grazing leases in favor of year-to-year permits while it drafted 212 separate environmental impact statements, a shift the same oral history program calls the rebellion’s immediate trigger. Nevada had the most at stake of any state: roughly 86% of its land was already under federal ownership and management, more than any other state, according to the same source.

State Sen. Norman Glaser, a Democrat, and Assemblyman Dean Rhoads, a Republican rancher representing Elko County’s 33rd District, were both cattlemen who carpooled together to Carson City during the 1979 legislative session, according to the oral history program’s account. The two agreed to introduce identical bills in their respective chambers and back whichever one cleared committee first. Rhoads’ version, Assembly Bill 413, declared that all unappropriated federal land within Nevada’s borders would come under state control. It passed. The oral history program’s own account identifies Nevada’s 1979 law as the law that touched off what came to be called the Sagebrush Rebellion across the West.

The bill proposed a state board of review with authority over land inside Nevada’s boundaries, according to the finding aid for the Sagebrush Rebellion Collection held by the University of Nevada, Reno’s Special Collections Department, which received the papers as a 1985 donation from Glaser. The same finding aid credits Nevada’s 1977 Legislature with laying the groundwork two years earlier, when it created a Select Committee on Public Lands — its members included Sens. Hilbrecht and Richard Blakemore and Assemblymen Hayes, Kissam and Moody — to press for changes in federal land policy and recruit other Western states to the cause. That committee’s work helped form the Western Coalition on Public Lands, the finding aid states.

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Several other Western states passed similar land-claim bills soon after, according to the Reno finding aid. Gregg Cawley, a University of Wyoming political science professor who has studied the Sagebrush Rebellion for decades, has said ranchers and state officials used the threat of a land transfer mainly as leverage — to pressure the Bureau of Land Management into taking their grazing complaints seriously, not because anyone expected an outright transfer of ownership to happen. Rhoads later said Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election made the federal government more approachable, which blunted the rebellion’s momentum even as the underlying frustration kept simmering in rural Nevada, according to the oral history program’s account.

Assembly Bill 413 was never put into effect. Nevada’s own legal reviews returned unfavorable opinions on the state’s authority to seize federally managed land, according to the University of Nevada Oral History Program’s account, and no state agency ever asserted the control the law claimed. Glaser’s own Committee on Natural Resources returned in 1983 with a softer approach, Senate Bill 40, trading the outright claim for cooperative planning between the state and federal land managers. That bill is still Nevada law, codified as NRS 321.7377, and it still directs the state’s land-use planning agency to draft joint plans with local governments for land under federal management.

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The claim-it-outright approach AB 413 embodied never returned to Nevada law. What has returned is a push to sell the same land instead. U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., added an amendment to a House budget bill in May 2025 that would have authorized selling more than 450,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service land in Washoe, Lyon, Pershing and Clark counties, according to the Nevada Wildlife Federation, which organized against the measure. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., and Montana Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke led the opposition that got the amendment stripped from the bill after a closed-door meeting, and Nevada Wildlife Federation executive director Russell Kuhlman said the sale would have set a precedent for disposing of federal land without public input, according to the federation’s own account of the fight. Amodei said afterward that the fight over the land was not finished.

Nevada’s federal land hasn’t moved an acre since the Sagebrush Rebellion fizzled out in the early 1980s. Only the argument for who should own it has changed — from a state Legislature that tried to claim it by statute in 1979, to a congressman who tried to sell pieces of it in 2025. Both attempts ran into the same wall: the land under dispute still belongs, on paper and in practice, to the federal government that has held it since before Nevada was a state.