Three years ago, in co-sponsoring with Democratic colleague from Michigan, Gary Peters, in legislation to eliminate duplicative government programs, Republican Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner said, “It is time we institute serious reforms and eliminate wasteful spending.” He has also worked with Democrats on measures to deliver government services to veterans, saying “I will continue to hold federal agencies accountable for waste and abuse of resources devoted to veterans.”

It is time for Gardner to join Democrats in another arena of waste, by joining the efforts of Montana Sen. Jon Tester to end the Bureau of Land Management’s noncompetitive leasing of public lands for oil and gas exploration. Tester recently filed a bill to amend the Mineral Leasing Act, titled the Leasing Market Efficiency Act. It is currently being reviewed by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

BLM currently allows land that is not claimed by oil and gas speculators in quarterly competitive auctions to still be snatched up with noncompetitive offers. That allows patient and wily oil and gas companies, and even anonymous speculators, to lock up Western public lands for as little as $1.50/acre annual rental fee, without filing any specific development plan.

As half of the BLM auction proceeds are supposed to be returned to the states where the land was sold, taxpayers have likely lost hundreds of millions of dollars at both the federal and state levels. A February report by Taxpayers for Common Sense found that Montana alone likely lost $110 million over the last decade. Tester said one reason he filed his bill was because 1.4 million acres of land sold at BLM auctions is sitting idle, with a third of leases since 1987 being granted through the noncompetitive process.

What this process has done over the years is allow oil and gas interests to hoard land on the tiny chance they might develop it. During the Trump administration, land virtually given away in noncompetitive leases has more than doubled from 141,000 acres in 2017 to nearly 379,000 in 2018. A report last year by the Center for American Progress found that nearly 3 million acres of land has been purchased with noncompetitive bids in mostly Western states from 2009 to 2018.

Yet a 2016 Congressional Budget Office report found that only 3 percent of that land is ever developed.

The lack of drilling for fossil fuels is a good thing, but it would be much better if that land was maximized for public recreation and conservation, which can be massive contributors to state and local economies. Federal data shows that outdoor recreation is worth $412 billion a year to the economy. That sounds like a better deal than selling off wild lands for $1.50 an acre and letting it stay idle.

All this should be on the mind of Sen. Gardner as the BLM plans to lease 47,685 acres of public lands in Colorado in December. In the last lease sale in March, more than half of the land was bumped into the noncompetitive lease category after being unclaimed. In December, all of the parcels in the Royal Gorge Field Office are already classified as having low oil and gas potential and will probably be up for grabs as non-competitive leases.

Last year, the biggest news Gardner made with the Bureau of Land Management was helping the Trump administration banish the agency headquarters and its scientific functions from Washington into a small office in Grand Junction in a building also shared with oil and gas companies. The office has only a couple dozen or so employees as the vast majority of BLM employees refused to move.

This year, Gardner can make better news by coming out against a giveaway of noncompetitive leases, and advocating for giving this land back to the residents of Colorado for public enjoyment. According to the Colorado Office of Economic Development, 92 percent of Coloradans participate in outdoor recreation, supporting a half-million direct jobs and pumping $37 billion annually into the state’s economy. That is why a host of fishing, hunting, birding, conservation and environmental justice organizations support Tester’s bill.

Idle land cannot do that.

Chandra Rosenthal is Rocky Mountain Field Office director for the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). She is a Grand Junction native.