Montana GOP Senate candidate Tim Sheehy did not disclose his position on the Property and Surroundings Analysis Heart, a property rights and environmental analysis nonprofit that has a historical past of advocating for privatizing America’s federal lands and rolling again environmental legal guidelines together with the Endangered Species Act.
Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and rich businessman who’s operating in opposition to three-term incumbent Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), joined PERC’s board in 2022, in line with the group’s filings with the IRS. However he failed to incorporate his place on the suppose tank in his marketing campaign monetary disclosure, in violation of Senate guidelines, HuffPost has discovered.
Public lands have emerged as a key subject within the race, with Tester portray Sheehy as a risk to their future and the Montana lifestyle. Sheehy’s failure to reveal his work at PERC may additional complicate his already messy messaging on public lands coverage.
Sheehy did report being a board director at different nonprofits; nevertheless, PERC doesn’t seem on his disclosure kind.
Sheehy’s marketing campaign advised HuffPost that Sheehy stepped down from the board previous to coming into the Senate race final June. Requested why he didn’t disclose his position at PERC, marketing campaign spokesperson Katie Martin mentioned, “This omission was an oversight. We are working on amending the report.”
Senate guidelines require candidates to report each paid and unpaid positions held within the two years previous to their candidacy at any enterprise enterprise, nonprofit group, labor group or academic establishment.
PERC confirmed that Sheehy left its board earlier than asserting his marketing campaign final 12 months. However as of Wednesday, PERC’s web site nonetheless listed Sheehy as a board member.
“Tim was elected to the board in Fall 2022 due to his relevant background as a successful local entrepreneur in the area of forest health, wildfires, and ranching, all conservation issues we are engaged in,” Kat Dwyer, the group’s advertising and marketing and media supervisor, mentioned in an electronic mail.
Based in 1980 and based mostly in Bozeman, Montana, PERC describes itself as an “independent,” “nonpartisan” suppose tank that advocates for “free market environmentalism” — the concept that personal property rights and market incentives result in higher environmental and conservation outcomes than authorities regulation.
Sheehy based Bridger Aerospace, a Bozeman, Montana-based aerial firefighting firm that depends virtually completely on federal contracts. As HuffPost beforehand reported, Bridger has continued to pitch itself as a frontrunner within the combat in opposition to local weather change, whilst Sheehy has toed the GOP line on the marketing campaign path and railed in opposition to what he calls the “climate cult” and “radical environmentalists.”
The millionaire businessman additionally owns a sprawling 7,000-acre ranch in Martinsdale, Montana, the place he co-founded a cattle firm and as soon as supplied unique, pay-to-play looking excursions.
PERC is extensively considered as a right-wing outfit. It has deep historic ties to the fossil gas {industry} and Donors Belief, a conservative group Mom Jones as soon as dubbed the “dark-money ATM of the right” that has funneled tens of millions of {dollars} to local weather change-denier teams. Kimberley Dennis, the co-founder and board chair of Donors Belief, is a present member of PERC’s board of administrators.
PERC says it’s “inaccurate” to characterize the group as right-wing.
“PERC is a non-partisan conservation organization dedicated to conserving land, water, and wildlife through innovative market and incentive-based solutions,” Dwyer mentioned. “PERC proudly works with policymakers across the political spectrum, including with the Biden administration on issues like forest restoration, wild horse adoption incentives, migration corridor conservation, and virtual fencing technology.”
Oil large ExxonMobil and Koch household foundations have traditionally given PERC cash, however PERC advised HuffPost that it has not acquired funding from fossil gas firms previously 10 years.
But it stays a “partner” of the State Coverage Community, an internet of right-wing, industry-allied suppose tanks that for many years have waged struggle in opposition to environmental laws, renewable vitality and local weather science. PERC supported the Trump administration’s industry-friendly rollback of Endangered Species Act protections and urged the Biden administration to not reverse the Trump-era modifications.
“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,” mentioned Matthew Koehler, media director at Wilderness Watch, an environmental group based mostly in Missoula, Montana. “Over the past five years or so, I’ve noticed them kind of going on a full court press to rebrand themselves and to soften some of their rhetoric, and through creative marketing make unsuspecting people think that their solutions — quote, unquote — are more palatable. But at the end of the day, this is an organization that is far-right.”
PERC merely can’t run away from its historical past, Koehler added.
Over its 4 many years, the group has advocated for privatizing federal lands, together with nationwide parks, growing charges for visiting parks and different federal lands, and masking park upkeep backlogs by diverting funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a decades-old program that makes use of offshore fossil gas revenues to determine and defend parks, wildlife refuges, forests and wildlife habitat.
In a 1999 coverage paper titled “How and Why to Privatize Federal Lands,” PERC’s then-director, Terry Anderson, and others laid out what they known as “a blueprint for auctioning off all public lands over 20 to 40 years.”
“Local control has to be returned, whether that means, you know, some of these public lands get turned over to state agencies, or even counties, or whether those decisions are made by a local landlord instead of by, you know, federal fiat a few thousand miles away.”
– GOP Senate candidate Tim Sheehy in an October interview with “Working Ranch Radio Show”
PERC says its help for public land privatization is previously. Anderson’s 1999 paper “is not representative of PERC’s current thinking,” Dwyer mentioned.
“PERC firmly believes that public lands should stay in public hands. We do not advocate for nor support privatization or divestiture,” she mentioned. “We support improved management of our public lands and using market-based incentives to achieve better management such as conservation leasing to allow conservation to be a use on public lands, addressing deferred maintenance, streamlining permitting for more forest restoration, and a more creative application of user fees in our national parks to support our superintendents and their parks’ unique needs.”
Very like PERC, Sheehy, a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, is attempting to distance himself from a as soon as full-throated embrace of pawning off federal lands. As HuffPost first reported, he advocated final 12 months for federal lands to be “turned over” to states — a wildly unpopular place amongst voters in Western states, together with Montana.
“Local control has to be returned,” Sheehy advised the “Working Ranch Radio Show” in October, “whether that means, you know, some of these public lands get turned over to state agencies, or even counties, or whether those decisions are made by a local landlord instead of by, you know, federal fiat a few thousand miles away.”
Regardless of these feedback, which got here a number of months into his marketing campaign, Sheehy says he opposes the sale and switch of federal lands and has accused Tester and his allies of mendacity about his place.
“Tim believes public lands must stay in public hands,” Sheehy’s spokesperson mentioned in an announcement. “Tim believes Montanans know best how to manage our land, not the Washington bureaucrats.”
Sheehy and PERC apparently now agree on the difficulty of protecting public lands public, however they’ve been at odds in terms of different insurance policies.
PERC has lengthy supported the concept of leasing federal lands for conservation and applauded the Biden administration’s latest rule to start issuing such leases to place conservation and ecosystem restoration on equal footing with drilling, mining and different conventional land makes use of.
However like most Republicans in Congress, Sheehy has condemned the Biden administration’s modifications to public land leasing.
“Instead of supporting the producers that they’re supposed to be enabling, they are putting constrictions in place that could potentially put them out of business,” he advised “Working Ranch Radio” final 12 months, referring to federal land managers. “So taking some of these leases out of agricultural production and moving them into conservation is deeply concerning.”
Nico Delgado, a spokesperson for Democratic tremendous PAC American Bridge twenty first Century, advised HuffPost that Sheehy’s failure to reveal his position at PERC is a part of a development of “bending the truth with Montanans.” Amongst different issues, Delgado famous, Sheehy admitted to mendacity to a nationwide park ranger about how he acquired a gunshot wound, because the Washington Submit first reported.
“Now he’s hiding being part of a group that wanted to jack up fees at national parks,” Delgado mentioned.
