NEW: Tim Sheehy Tries to Hide Leadership Position at Anti-Public Lands Think Tank
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
CONTACT
rehm@mtdems.org
Sheehy supports transferring public lands and was a board member at a group that wants to privatize federal land
Helena, MT – New reporting from HuffPost revealed that Tim Sheehy failed to disclose that he was a board member at the Property and Environmental Research Center (PERC), an organization that has a “history of advocating for privatizing America’s federal lands.”
PERC has a “well-established, 44-year history of advocating to gut and undermine our nation’s bedrock environmental laws in favor of private property rights” such as “privatizing federal lands, including national parks, increasing fees for visiting parks and other federal lands, and covering park maintenance backlogs by diverting funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund.”
Sheehy is on record supporting transferring public lands to “state agencies, or even counties,” which would make it easier to sell off Montana’s public lands to out-of-state multimillionaires like him.
Read more below.
HuffPost: Montana GOP Candidate Failed To Disclose Post At Right-Wing Think Tank
June 12, 2024
Chris D’Angelo
Montana GOP Senate candidate Tim Sheehy failed to disclose his role at the Property and Environment Research Center, a property rights and environmental research nonprofit that has a history of advocating for privatizing America’s federal lands and rolling back environmental laws including the Endangered Species Act.
Sheehy [...] joined PERC’s board in 2022, according to the organization’s filings with the IRS. But he failed to include his position at the think tank in his campaign financial disclosure, in violation of Senate rules, HuffPost has learned.
Public lands have emerged as a key issue in the race, with Tester painting Sheehy as a threat to their future and the Montana way of life. Sheehy’s failure to disclose his work at PERC could further complicate his already messy messaging on public lands policy.
Sheehy did report being a board director at other nonprofits; however, PERC does not appear on his disclosure form.
Senate rules require candidates to report both paid and unpaid positions held in the two years prior to their candidacy at any business enterprise, nonprofit organization, labor organization or educational institution.
PERC confirmed that Sheehy left its board before announcing his campaign last year. But as of Wednesday, PERC’s website still listed Sheehy as a board member.
PERC is widely viewed as a right-wing outfit. It has deep historical ties to the fossil fuel industry and Donors Trust, a conservative group Mother Jones once dubbed the “dark-money ATM of the right” that has funneled millions of dollars to climate change-denier groups. Kimberley Dennis, the co-founder and board chair of Donors Trust, is a current member of PERC’s board of directors.
“PERC has a well-established, 44-year history of advocating to gut and undermine our nation’s bedrock environmental laws in favor of private property rights,” said Matthew Koehler, media director at Wilderness Watch, an environmental organization based in Missoula, Montana.
PERC simply can’t run away from its history, Koehler added.
Over its four decades, the group has advocated for privatizing federal lands, including national parks, increasing fees for visiting parks and other federal lands, and covering park maintenance backlogs by diverting funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a decades-old program that uses offshore fossil fuel revenues to establish and protect parks, wildlife refuges, forests and wildlife habitat.
In a 1999 policy paper titled “How and Why to Privatize Federal Lands,” PERC’s then-director, Terry Anderson, and others laid out what they called “a blueprint for auctioning off all public lands over 20 to 40 years.”
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