Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s full-bore assault on “federal overreach” regarding the state’s navigable water title claims has become somewhat tiresome. His latest attention- grabbing efforts raise some fundamental questions about the Alaska Dept. of Natural Resources’ issuance of “cease and desist” and similar letters to federal land managers. My suspicion is that these are not worth the paper or the bandwidth they are written on.
The state’s letter complains about federal motorized watercraft prohibitions on Mendenhall Lake and River, but admits that these water bodies lie within the exterior boundary of Tongass National Forest.
The Tongass NF was created and reserved from the federal public domain by various public land orders issued between 1902 and 1925. The Submerged Lands Act of 1953 granted the new state of Alaska title to only those submerged federal lands underlying navigable water bodies that were unreserved at the time of statehood in 1959. Simple math should reveal that the period 1902-1925 considerably predates 1959.
Unless there is some peculiar historical fact that precluded Mendenhall Lake and River from being a part of the national forest that surrounds and contains them, I’d have to conclude that the state’s title claim here is all wet.
Regarding the cease-and-desist letter apparently sent by DNR to the superintendent of Lake Clark National Park regarding the Park Service’s dock construction, if I were that person, I’d tell the state to come back once it has a federal court decree in hand that validates the state’s claim of title, and then discussions can commence.
— T. E. Meacham
Anchorage
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