Mark Winkleman points to a map on the wall. The state land commissioner is seated in a conference room at the Land Department office.

He says the Land Department should have authority to engage in land exchanges.

“We’ve got about a half-a-million acres that are what we call captured, that are inside federal areas, parks, wilderness, where we can’t do anything with this property,” Mr. Winkleman says.

In two cases going back to 1988, the Arizona Supreme Court stopped the practice, saying the Arizona Constitution didn’t allow the state to trade away trust land.

On the Land Department’s map is a small blue square. It’s a parcel of state trust land — a square mile — surrounded by Organ Pipe National Monument in southern Arizona. There are parcels like that throughout the state, he says.

The federal government doesn’t have the money to buy the lands, but could swap for them — if the Land Department had authority to do so on its end.

Sierra Club: Trades Hurt State

Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, however, have long opposed exchanges involving state trust land. In a previous interview, Sandy Bahr of the Sierra Club has said the federal government could end trading away forest land on the urban fringe to close the holes left by trust lands deep inside national parks. In addition, she says, the state has been burned trading away lands that proved far more valuable than what was received in the bargain.

Mr. Winkleman acknowledges past swaps were not well handled. But he adds safeguards can be put in place for what he calls an important tool.

“I do think people should be rightfully concerned that that tool have appropriate safeguards so that the state isn’t taken advantage of,” he says.

In recent elections, the voters have refused to grant the state power to trade trust land. Like many reforms involving the Land Department, authority to conduct land swaps would require amending the state constitution.

Recommendations by a task force on trust-land reform included giving the Land Department authority to exchange land. The reform effort died when the Legislature failed to consider it last year.

There is talk of a new trust-land reform measure for the 2006 ballot. The Nature Conservancy, the Arizona Education Association and the Sonoran Institute are considering whether to collect signatures for an initiative.

“The goals would be to provide for better-planned communities, to ensure dedicated funding for education and provide for adequate conservation of important ecological and nature areas of the state,” says Pat Graham, state director for the Nature Conservancy.

He adds the details have not been worked out — including the issue of land exchanges. —