EPA Takes Land From State In Violation Of Century-Old Congressional Act

by Ben Bullard 
Republican Wyoming Governor Matt Mead issued a statement Monday blasting the Environmental Protection Agency for unilaterally ignoring Congressionally established law in order to take roughly 1 million acres of property out of State jurisdiction and hand it over to two Indian tribes.
The EPA ruled in December that a 1905 law that allowed non-Indians to establish homesteads inside the disputed territory did not end the territory’s reservation status. But Congress had made no such distinction at the time it passed the law.
The Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes, each of which occupies the Wind River Indian Reservation (located in the west-central portion of the State), had approached the EPA with a “Treatment as a State” request in order to acquire jurisdictional control over the territory under the Clean Air Act.

The EPA ruling’s overt implication is that the tribes now have the legal prerogative to be notified of any air quality permit filed within 50 miles of the reservation’s boundary.
But the ruling has other implications that concern municipal and State officials — especially “that land that the state, Fremont County and the city of Riverton consider to be under local jurisdiction is, in fact, Indian Country,” according to the WyoFile nonprofit news blog. “And,” WyoFile observes, “as part of the Wind River Indian Reservation, the city and surrounding area could be subject to federal policing, among other laws.”
Mead has responded to the ruling by pledging to ignore it, and to wage a court battle to have the EPA’s decision overturned.
“I understand that the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone Tribes have a different opinion about the Wind River Reservation Boundary,” his statement reads. “My deep concern is about an administrative agency of the federal government altering a state’s boundary and going against over 100 years of history and law. This should be a concern to all citizens because, if the EPA can unilaterally take land away from a state, where will it stop? …The federal government clearly had a predetermined outcome it sought to uphold.”