Ben Burr – BlueRibbon Coalition

Ben has been the executive director of the BlueRibbon Coalition since 2021. Prior to that he worked in the U.S. Senate. He currently lives in southern Utah, but he loves exploring everywhere.

Hi, I’m Tony and welcome to the Jeep Talk Show, the talk show where we talk about all things Jeep from trail riding to over landing and everything in between. So sit back, grab a cold one and get ready for another great guest right here on the Jeep Talk Show. Are you ready? It’s time for the Jeep Talk Show with hosts Tony, Josh, Wendy and Chuck.

I was really happy that Ben Burr of Blue Ribbon Coalition was able to make time for us so quickly after the Supreme Court decision, uh, uh, turning down or overturning, uh, the Chevron deference. Many of you may not know what that means and I wanted to get Ben on here to help explain it to how it might mean a lot for us and trail closures.

From around the world or from your city and sometimes just down the street. It’s the Jeep Talk Show interview.

Ideal boys and girls, it’s time for another Jeep Talk Show interview and today we’re going to be, I always say tonight, but we’re actually doing this during the afternoon. So I’m going to say today, today we’re talking with Ben Burr of Blue Ribbon Coalition. Ben’s been on the show before. I don’t remember how long I didn’t look it up, Ben. It’s been a few months since you were last on, uh, but certainly you being on here again. Uh, and I’ll, I’ll just mention this at the top. Uh, I’m, uh, I wanted to get you on very quickly because of the recent Supreme Court ruling, uh, with Chevron deference. God, I hate that. That just sounds weird. It sounds legal is the best way I can describe it. Uh, it’s almost chemical in taste.

Ben has been the executive director of Blue Ribbon Coalition since 2021. Prior to that, he worked, uh, in the US Senate. Uh, he currently lives in Southern Utah, but he loves exploring everywhere. You can find out more information about the Blue Ribbon Coalition at share trails.org. We went through the whole thing of why it’s not blueribbincoalition.com last time. So we’re just going to leave that alone and just say, just go to share trails.com, but it is called Blue Ribbon Coalition. You’ve heard it. I think everybody’s heard of it before. All right, Ben, thanks for being back with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. It has been a minute and so it’s good to be back. There’s a lot going on with us and with the news and with how our public lands and trails are getting managed and so it should be a good discussion. Glad to be here. So first off, this is really good news. I mean, there’s, there’s a lot of negative Nellies out there that do not like the Supreme Court doing anything. And in general, I’m with them. I don’t really like the government doing anything to us. Uh, but, but as far as, uh, off-roaders, uh, this is actually a very good ruling for us. Yeah. Yeah. So the, the ruling was one of the very last cases they decided in their current session and it was a case that was brought forward by a group of fishermen that I think their firm’s called Loper Bright. And, uh, and so it was a case that people have been watching for a while. We’ve actually been watching it for, since it’s been working its way through the courts and it became apparent back even when Neil Gorsuch was nominated to the bench that he’s always had a very different view of what we call the administrative state, which are these executive branch agencies that tend to at this day and age make a lot of our policy. Instead of Congress making it, you have these decision makers and the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service, the National Park Service, and they’re really deciding the law. They’re deciding what the penalties are. They’re deciding what things you can and can’t do as a citizen, which is really something our constitution reserves for Congress. But for the last 80 years, our Supreme Court has kind of looked the other way on that and said, well, the way it was kind of interpreted is that these agency staff are experts in their field. And so they tend to know more about this than either us in the judicial branch or members of Congress do. So we’re going to defer to them to make rules. And so if an organization like Blue Ribbon Coalition were to bring a lawsuit during the age in which Chevron deference was the precedent that governed a lot of this, we might come and say, hey, we don’t like how the agency is interpreting this statute or this law and we think they’re wrong on their science. We don’t think they’re looking at this correctly. The courts would basically say, well, but they’re the government and they have expertise. And so we’re not going to, we’re going to defer to them. And so it really marginalized and disenfranchised the American people from having a judicial

scrutiny on a lot of these federal regulations and decisions that get made by people that they can’t vote for. And so we were hoping the Supreme Court would rule the way they did. We feel like they kind of ruled even stronger than what we were expecting. And we think it opens the door for a lot of new ways of looking at how we fight to keep public lands open.

We’ve been fighting these battles in court since 1987. And this has been in place since 1984. And so during the whole existence of Blue Ribbon Coalition’s time as an organization, we’ve been operating in this environment where Chevron deference was how things worked.

It’s going to be a very different next 30 to 40 years with this new precedent in place. Yeah.

The more I looked into it, the more impressed I was and actually the more upset I was that this has been in place and I didn’t know it. I mean, it’s my own fault for not knowing it, but it’s just like, it’s, it’s stupid.

Yeah. Since science became science, scientists have been shifting things and not always purposely shifting things to the way they feel, the way they look, the predetermined, they predetermined the outcome that’s based on their bias and the bias could just be what they think, political, a number of things that they want to protect a species of something. It’s just the right thing to do. And even if they’re not just tainting the evidence, that, that lean helps taint the evidence. Basically my opinion is now there’s a lot of people out there smarter than me and know a lot more stuff than I do, but I’ve always looked at it like if you’re not an expert, there’s always something that you’re not going to get right.

And even whenever a group of scientists sign a paper and say, this is the way it is, you know, deal with it. I don’t trust it because there’s, there’s stuff that comes up all the time that proves science wrong. That’s, that’s how, that’s the progress of science is determining that this was inaccurate. This is the theory. Now it’s wrong. This is how it really works. It’s the, the advancement of knowledge, not just shut up and listen to the experts. So I love this because it puts it back in the hands of just people like you and me to make the determination. And they can call, I think judges can call on whoever they want to call or check with who they want to call with, but having somebody that is unelected and you can correct me on this. There’s, there’s nothing going to come back on any of them. If they’re wrong, it’s like, Oh, well that’s what the science was at the time.

Yeah. No, those are all good points. The first one is that you hadn’t heard of this was the first problem when I was working in the Senate, I worked for Senator Mike Lee and we actually had introduced legislation

that would have corrected this legislatively through the Congress, instead of having the Supreme court reinterpret their precedent on this.

And and we were, and I would go out and try and promote this piece of legislation and just lucky you was, it was hard to say like, well, we need to do like the Chevron deference awareness 5k or something to, because it is such a bad development in our government. We really need to raise awareness of Chevron deference. And the Supreme court did that for us. Now everybody knows what it is.

And, and, and it raises the question of, well, how do we design and put in place the actual government we want now that this government we’ve had is no longer seen as constitutional.

And so that’s the first, the folks who weren’t happy about this, this doctrine being overturned are typically those who sympathize with the government. They were saying, well, there isn’t the same level of expertise in the legislative branch or in the judicial branches. That’s why we’ve concentrated this power here in the executive branch.

And and so that raises the first question you raised, which is what is the actual value of expertise in policymaking when even expertise itself is very fallible at times.

And if you read the constitution, the constitution doesn’t give a lot of deference to expertise. The constitution cares a lot more about humans abusing power in our country than it does about how much they know about the policy environment they’re operating in. And that’s the problem I had with Chevron deference is it put way too much power in the hands of people who had zero accountability. And it doesn’t mean that expertise doesn’t have a place in our government. We want our policies to be informed by the best information we possibly can get.

But at the end of the day, I like I to the folks who are very upset about, oh, well, now the experts won’t be able to rule us anymore. I look at the last 30 years and they say now our government will just be run by corporations and evil interests that want to just destroy the planet, destroy, pollute the earth. And I’m just like, well, great, point to me the great successes where the corporations haven’t been influencing the executive branch.

There’s never been more corporate influence on our government than in the last 30 years during the era of Chevron deference. It wasn’t that Chevron deference was preventing that. It was just creating a new system for them to manipulate, which didn’t require going through Congress. They could just manipulate the agencies they needed to work through. And so if you go and look at the revolving doors of who goes in and out of these agencies, like the EPA and FTC and the FCC and the Department of Interior, like it’s a lot of people that are in the highest levels of these industries, like the FCC. I remember there’s like a board that is governed by five commissioners or whatever. And during a Democratic presidency, three of those will be Democratic appointed. The other two would be holdovers from the previous whenever the last time Republican was in charge.

And those people are always coming out of like the telecommunications industry, like Verizon or Comcast or where it wasn’t that the corporations didn’t have influence and that this prevented them. This didn’t change that. Corporations are very powerful. They’re going to influence our government one way or another. Non deference didn’t stop a single thing that they were doing.

And then back to the point of the expertise.

I’ve always thought it’s curious that Congress doesn’t have the expertise to make all these rules and laws. I have worked in Congress and if you look at the budget that the Congress gives to itself to fund its staff, to fund its offices, are you there still? Yes. Okay. Sorry. Your picture disappeared on my thing.

I don’t know if that’s a, it’s small and in the corner. It’s a little circle down in the corner. I’ll back up and restart that thought again, just so that we’re on the same page. So let’s take a quick pause so that I don’t know where to edit it. Otherwise we’ll have this discussion in there.

So just give it about five seconds and go.

So the other point I want to raise is this, this, this point you raised on the expertise and to what extent should it be influencing your government? My thought there is that expertise should really live within the Congress and the legislative branch.

The legislative branch gives itself, it has the power of the purse. It controls how every penny of tax dollar money gets spent. It gives itself $7 billion to operate as a legislative branch. Sweet. I need to have that power for the show. Yeah.

They give the executive branch $4 trillion and then they say, well, we don’t have the expertise. It’s the executive branch that has it all. We don’t have the expertise to write travel plans for the Bureau of Land Management. And I’m like, well, you could, you could, you could give yourself the money. You could buy yourself another office building in DC. You could fill it with people that know about the area. I mean, ideally you’d want your offices in the States you represent.

If we’re doing travel plans in Moab, the senators in Utah should have staff in Moab that know everything about that area and are informing that Senator on the issues there and helping them design travel plans. And then they get to vote for those plans.

And then they get to be elected or not based on what they vote for. And I can tell you that no politician in the state of Utah would put their political career on the line to vote for what the Biden administration has been doing to our travel management here in the state I’m from. And so that’s where it isn’t about expertise. This is about the raw exercise of political power with no accountability.

We could have the expertise in a branch of government that also has political accountability. It’s just super convenient not to do that. Well, and correct me on this, correct me on this. And you have actually worked inside the belly of the beast. So you probably know this and I probably had us have a very rudimentary understanding of it. If, if Congress is responsible for passing laws and they can, they can pass, uh, not them, but the, the, the Chevron difference allows these agencies to pass things rules basically for them, then they can just say, Oh, that’s, that’s these guys. It’s not me because no matter what law you put in place, the people that voted you in, some are going to like it. Some are not going to like it. And it’s all about how it’s all about getting reelected. And, and, and frankly, I like the idea of Congress not doing anything. I mean, sometimes they need to do things, but like closing a 300 trails and Moab or 300 miles of trails and Moab, then they don’t need to do that. I mean, is there, there’s no good reason that I can see for that. Um, so I just, I think, but I think if I have to choose between them doing it or somebody that has no political accountability whatsoever, I would choose to have that power in the Congress

because then they can be an elect. I don’t think that would have ever happened if political accountability would have been a factor in that decision. Nobody would have like, they would have been unelected just over that plan alone in the state of Utah.

And so I think it never would have come for a vote.

That would not have been the policy that would have been enacted. If they felt like they needed to change the management of those trails in Utah, they would have had to have done something that would appease their voters. And right now that’s not even a question that these agencies consider is will the voters be happy with this? All they had to check the box of is did we cite enough documented academic sources to justify on the most minimum rational level possible what we did.

And that’s not how I don’t want a political system that that’s how it operates. I like, these are political decisions. We don’t live in a technocracy. There’s nothing in our constitution that allows for it. But we’ve kind of created a safe space for a technocracy to exist where we’re being ruled by data and administrative power and people who are not accountable to the people. And I don’t like that lack of accountability. And I just want to point this out. You’ve said it a couple of times. The Constitution.

Why are we doing something that is not in the Constitution? I mean, if it was constitutional, the Supreme Court wouldn’t have said, no, we can’t do this anymore. So we’ve been doing this for a long time. We’ve been living our lives in a situation that was unconstitutional.

So it’s what whatever the government can get away with and how long it takes it to get

turned over. This is one of the reasons why the right people in the Supreme Court is important.

It’s in Congress too, but I mean, it took the Supreme Court to take care of this after so many years. Yeah. And this is going to probably change a lot of how Congress operates when they’re going to have to do their damn job. They will have to do their job for once.

And that’s probably coming. It’ll change a little bit how the judicial branch operates and what cases, how they choose to approach these cases. And so for the people who look at this and I mean, BRC, we were happy that this happened.

But it’s not going to change anything immediately right now. Good. I’m glad you pointed that out. That doesn’t just negate anything that’s been done. It just opens the door. They were very specific in the ruling that it doesn’t negate anything that’s previously relied on Chevron deference. And so that means everything up to that point is going to have to be re-litigated under the new precedent in some way, shape, or form. And the Supreme Court also decided another case in the same week that was less popularized. But what it did was it also raised the statute of limitations of when a plaintiff could claim injury from a federal action. And so what that did, like normally, Blue Ribbon Coalition, we have a statute of limitation of six years on administrative process if we are going to appeal it. This basically says it’s six years from when the injury occurs. And so a decision might have been made 10 years ago, but we don’t get injured from it until today. We still have standing to challenge that decision now today. And so what I see Chevron deference is like you’re in a football game and you just got an interception on the other team’s like five yard line and then got tackled right there. We still have a whole field ahead of us to decide what this is going to mean and which things that have been hurting us are no longer going to be in play. But all of that’s going to take another decade worth of multiple phases of litigation from it. And it depends on what agencies you deal with. For us, that’ll be with the BLM, the Forest Service, the Park Service and some of those.

We’re going to have to be, there’s a lot of things that, I mean, we’re challenging those trail closures in Millamp right now. I can tell you that the Chevron deference case will be making a presence in our motion for submarine judgment that we’re working on right now. Just because these agencies always are relying on some pretty thin regulatory authority to be doing these things they’re doing.

And so we have, I’ve told people that we’ve been, I feel like I’ve been preparing BRC for this moment. I took over in 2021. One of the first things I did was I hired a policy director who’s very good at analyzing these federal plans. And together we go and analyze them to submit comments. We get the public to help us. We are always asking your listeners and our members and everybody to come and submit comments on the plans we’re working on because that enhances and improves our legal standing. And that’s why we’re doing it so that we can be positioning ourselves to be fighting lawsuits against the federal government in an environment where a lot of the precedents that govern this litigation world are changing under our feet.

And we’ve been doing anywhere from two to 300 of those a year where we’re commenting and participating on federal actions.

And so now I’m talking to lawyers, I mean, we’ll be announcing soon, but we have a senior staff attorney that’s going to be joining BRC. This person’s just making some, it’s a career change for them. So we’re letting them work through that process. But we have 10 to 15 cases right now that we could go work on tomorrow because we have standing, we’re still within our statute of limitations. They’re questioning really important, valid, these regulatory authorities that are thin and that need to be challenged.

And that takes years to do that prep work. You can’t just wake up tomorrow and say, “Oh, this Chevron deference has happened. I’m going to go fight a crusade against the administrative state.”

It takes years to establish that legal standing because you establish it by participating in the administrative process to begin with. And so we have it in multiple different appellate court jurisdictions. We have it in different states. We have it with different agencies. We have it on different issues.

Every possible statute or regulatory authority you can imagine that governs our access to public land, I’m confident we have strong legal standing to challenge any of those at this point.

And so we’re going to be making moves to do that. It will be a multiple year process. And so in order for us to commit to that, we definitely need the support of your listeners, of anybody in this off-road space, anybody that is buying a Jeep for the purpose of going and using it to explore public lands and the awesome trails that exist in this country.

We will be fighting hard. We already are, but we have big plans to keep doing a lot more in the coming months and years and we is now the time to call the troops. We need all the support we can get. And I’ll just mention the website again, sharetrails.org. It’ll be in the show notes for this interview episode.

So let me ask this. Actually, I’ve got two questions and I’ll start with this one. Does this mean the removal of the Chevron deference? Does this mean that we may not see more trail closures or not as likely to see more trail closures in Moab or anywhere across the country, really?

Probably not quite yet. I believe there’s very strong political pressure from the Biden administration to implement the agenda they have in the works.

And the decisions they make might be built on very, very shaky and loose legal ground

in the wake of this, but they don’t care. They’re willing to take their chances that they won’t be challenged. Right. Because frankly, if they can get it in place, their hopes is that nobody’s going to challenge it. Nobody’s going to go back with litigation to either challenge it or remove it. So if they do enough of it, it makes it very difficult on folks like you guys to attack this and other things. Yeah, and that is exactly what they’ve been doing, is just a barrage of plans and things that they’ve had sitting on the shelves for years. Now they’re finally dusting them off and rushing them through.

So we don’t expect this to stop them at all. The reason I’m confident that they’re not going to stop, at least for the next six months, is you had this BLM, they call it the BLM Land Health and Conservation Rule. And what this was, is they basically just said, we, the BLM, have the authority to sell a conservation lease on public land so we can find an organization like the Nature Conservancy and they can give us money and we’ll come up with some kind of a contract where they get to define how land gets managed through the form of a conservation lease.

And they say, and we have authority to do this because LEPMA, the Federal Land Policy Management Act, contemplates grazing leases for cattle. And so if grazing operators can have leases, then why can’t we just make up whatever lease we want?

And I would argue that while the grazing program has its own statutory authorizations above and beyond LEPMA, there’s nothing like that for this conservation leasing program.

And so this conservation rule, this conservation leasing program, they really conjured it up out of thin air.

And they really rushed it through. It’s the kind of rule that is really subject to scrutiny on all the, like the EPA versus West Virginia, the Chevron, the Loper-Brythe case. There’s a handful of cases that really, if you were, I mean, lawyers can convince themselves of anything, but if you were being honest with yourself, you’d be saying, this isn’t the right way to do this. If this is a good policy, the Congress should introduce it and pass it, but we don’t have the authority to do this. And it’s going to take a judge slapping them down a few times before they start to hold back and say, never mind, this isn’t the right way. It’s not worth it because I’m not going to get it through. And that’s kind of where we need to get, so we can go back to Congress. Yeah. And that’s my point. It’s like getting a turnover on the five yard line. We have to make some good next place. And there’s definitely many of those to make right now, but until you start advancing up the field, they still think they’re five yards away from their touchdown and they’re going to act like that.

And so I don’t think it changes anything overnight dramatically. One thing I’ve learned from the federal agency decision makers, especially the higher up the chain you go, and like, so the Washington DC level, like these folks that are there working for the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Interior for the Biden administration, they’re pretty radical and they’re very, and they’re not going to, they don’t care. What the Supreme Court said, they know what they’re trying to do and they’re going to do it.

And so it is all going to have to be challenged one way or another, either in court or Congress is going to have to slap them down or you have an administration change and then a lot of it can get done administratively. And so that all, so I think in the long run, this will, if there are successful legal challenges to the authorities, they’re basing these trail closures on, I do think it’ll start to hard code a deterrence to just close the trails through administrative process, which is what they’re doing now. What it will likely also do is like, none of this will happen in a vacuum. It’ll also probably lead to the creation of some laws that define more clearly how the agencies are supposed to do this. So we’re going to have to be just as vigilant on what’s happening on the legislative front

with this stuff as we are with the litigation and administrative front. And so we’re doing that. One of the bills we helped kind of advise on, and it was one that we were happy to be a part of was Senator Lee’s office introduced the Outdoor Americans with Disabilities Act just a few weeks ago. And what this does is it requires federal land managers when they’re doing something like a travel planner, determining which roads to keep open on the lands they manage, they have to analyze the impact on Americans with disabilities. And it clarifies that a motorized recreation is a form of disability access and that they have to keep a certain mileage density of roads open in a specific area or their plans are discriminatory.

And so I’m hoping we’ll see a lot more policies like this where we hard code into the agencies that you have to, where they’ve had it hard coded to where things are just going to close and close and close. As this gets redefined in the law, like all of those hard coded rules that are leading to closure are preachers of administrative policy, not legislative statute.

So then if the next pieces of legislation that come in are also legislative statutes that codify the need to keep these roads open, I think will change a lot of the ground that we’re of this field we’re playing on. And it’s, we desperately need it right now. I feel like the system has been rigged against us for a long time and things are happening now which feel like it’s unrigging that previous system and hopefully rigging it more in our favor moving forward. So that’s what… And I just want to point out because I see what I think are a lot of Democrats and liberals upset about the removal of Chevron deference. They wanted these non-elected officials making these decisions. And when you say better for us, it’s not conservatives, it’s for both parties. It’s everybody because it means that the public lands or the land is going to be able to be used by more than just a conservative, more than a Republican, it’s going to be used because there are Democrats in Jeeps. There are Democrats that like to go hiking. There are Democrats that like riding motorcycles. So this truly is something that’s good for all of us, not just one political side. Now let me ask you this.

Do you see, and we’re early in the game on this and I don’t know, but do you see that this is going to be a defanging or maybe even making it very difficult for several of these three letter agencies to be able to do anything other than just occupy a space and collect a federal salary?

No, they’ll be able to do what they’re statutorily authorized to do, which is in some cases not a bad thing. And so for example, like if we want these federal agencies to protect cultural resources, there are strong laws that exist to protect cultural resources and for them to prosecute people that are caught vandalizing or stealing or defacing cultural properties and ruins and artifacts and things on public land, they don’t need administrative powers to do that. They already have abundant power under the law to do that and we need them to do that. And that should be their job and they should be focusing on that.

My hope is that it does lead to more of that, like on the ground, in the field management and a whole lot less of this planning, which is, I mean, you go look at who’s developing these monument management plans and travel plans and you read the contributor list and it’s like watching the credits of a Hollywood movie. That’s where all their money is being spent.

And then they pass these plans and it’s like, and so they’re really just planning agencies at this point and not management agencies.

And so they, I mean, they’ll be able to still operate, well, to a clear authorization to do.

And for the most part, that isn’t where the problems are. Where the problems are is in the gray area where they interpreted or just completely ignored the statutes and just conjured up authorities and rules for themselves. And so the things that I think are vulnerable is like the travel planning and the definition of OHVs and all of this, it’s all coming out of like an executive order. It was signed by Richard Nixon.

There isn’t statutes that have been passed by Congress that define and determine how off road vehicle you should happen on public land. And so that’s going to be really up in the air as far as how that gets interpreted in the coming years. And that will get challenged. The Forest Service has what’s called a roadless rule where they just decided we’re going to create certain areas of the forest that we’re going to call roadless.

Congress never said, hey, we want you guys to do this roadless. That never happened. And so the agencies are like, oh, well, we just decided that we came up with that as a way to implement in some ways, something like the Wilderness Act, which Congress did pass. And so it’s like a congressionally designated wilderness area where Congress says this space on a map, this boundary is designated wilderness, manage it as wilderness. They’re going to manage that as wilderness still. They have clear authorization to do that. There’s 15 administrative designations like ACECs, Lands of Wilderness Characteristics, Wilderness Study Areas, Roadless Rule. They’ve managed that all as if it is wilderness. But Congress never said, hey, that’s all wilderness. Manage it that way. They just said, we think we’re going to do this because in case one day you do make this wilderness, we want to have it ready for you. And that’s the kind of stuff that to me is going to start to get. Yeah, that’s nuts. I mean, what you’re telling me and maybe I’m very naive, but what you’re telling me is there’s people in our government operating stuff not based on laws, just on what they decide they want to do. And then if as long as they don’t get slapped down or put in jail, we’re going to keep doing this. And that’s screwy. Chevron deference created that space. Why they do it this way. And you have like the 30 by 30 agenda, which is that they want to lock up 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.

Congress never passed a law that said the 20 by 30 agenda is the policy of this land. They never said that. Joe Biden enacted an executive order that says we like the ideals of the 30 by 30 agenda, which really comes from the United Nations. And so I mean, really, this should be like a treaty. I mean, this is like so unconstitutional what they’re doing. But we like this. And so all of you land management agencies, you don’t have a directive to manage everything you do. We want it to kind of fall in line with this 30 by 30 agenda that we like. And that’s an executive order. So those are your marching orders. And so it’s just not how this is supposed to work. If that was such a popular policy preference, the Congress can vote for it. Right. And they can go defend it to the people. But to have that done through executive fiat is those are the kinds of things that I hope to see

this the post Chevron deference judiciary strike down. And but they’re not going to just do wave a magic wand to strike it all down. It’s going to be.

Line of scrimmage.

Yeah, we are going to have to go fight over each one of these things. And it’s going to take groups like Blue Ribbon Coalition that have the legal standing and the resources and the legal team to do that, to do that. It’s not going to just happen on its own. And so I’m hoping that groups like ours and then there’s a few others that do good work as well. I’m just hoping that there’s a lot of people getting ready to come after this stuff. I know we are. Hang on one second. Doug’s barking.

Let’s see if I can get my question in and then we should be good.

So I’m probably asking the wrong person, but do you see any negative to not having the Chevron difference that that maybe we’re just really excited about what’s going to what’s going to do for us? But is there anything that’s going to hurt us? Yeah, I mean, I don’t think there’s ever like in politics, you don’t ever get like decidedly one sided victories. I think the balance of favor is on our side on this one. I think that there’s a lot of administrative loosey goosey policies that are empowering these agencies right now. But I think that there are times where Chevron deference was probably used, especially if you were like if you were in the utilization of public land space. So let’s say if you’re like a cattle ranching operator or mining and gas exploration, things like that.

There I mean, the Chevron deference comes from a case which was Chevron, the oil company, like actually fighting over land use policy. And so there are cases where I think you’ve seen the courts kind of give deference to age. Like there are times when the agencies are in favor of things on both sides of the political spectrum or on any side of any issue. It’s not always one sided. And so there will be times where Chevron deference was used to probably benefit the interests of BRC members. Like it’s hard for me to even think of one off the top of our head because it is so rigged that way to kind of want to close and restrict access to things.

And but I just don’t believe that these things happen in a vacuum. I also believe that the fallout is going to be a more activist Congress. Right. And that means that there’s a lot of work to do to be well organized, to be able to do the amount of lobbying and public pressure, grassroots, populist influencing of policy that the especially the outdoor recreation community just hasn’t ever fully flexed those muscles that I’ve seen. When outdoor recreation shows up to Congress, it’s like begging for money. They just want grants and things. And every now and then they get the few little fringy policy outcomes that they want.

And it’s just wild to me because outdoor recreation and especially motorized outdoor recreation is a massive juggernaut of an industry and an economic driver. And it doesn’t act even remotely close to as big as it is in this space. And if it doesn’t wake up and start acting as big as it is, then you can see some laws get passed in the wake of this that are probably really unhelpful and kind of permanently in trying what was previously overlooked and allowed.

So let me make sure let me make sure I understand this. There is a multi billion dollar aftermarket industry and of course, multi billion dollar and just like Jeep, for example, selling Jeeps. So you’re telling me that those folks that are reaping all this money don’t see it in their best interest to help support the keeping of trails and stuff open. It kind of seems like they should be really interested in that. If putting their money where their mouth is, is how you measure that level of support. They’re absolutely not. Yeah. Like at the bottom of the barrel, no, they have not been.

And so there’s a lot of work to do there. And I see it as bigger than all of that. I mean, if you look at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, they really studies on the economic impact of the outdoor recreation industry and it’s everything right. It’s motorized. It’s the non motorized forms of recreation and all of that. But the top five biggest, like number one of the biggest sectors in this industry is motorboating and fishing. No, that makes sense. Number two is RVs and number three is hunting.

Number four is OHV, which is like ATVs and motorcycles and four wheelers and stuff. Number five is snow sports, just skiing, snowboarding and snowmobiling. So the top five all have are either predominantly or are mostly motorized forms of recreation. And it makes sense because to go buy a backpacking tent, I can buy a whole, I could buy out a whole business for the cost of what you spend on a really nice motor home. Right. You know, and so these these industries are very, very big and they tend to get involved in like trade policy and tax policy and things like that. But when it comes to public land access, they’re very quiet and with both their voice and their money. And if they don’t wake up and start throwing that weight around and they and hopefully they will. Part of what encourages that is the fact that there’s policy movement around an interest that they have. Right. And and Chevron Deferences can require a lot more policy movement around everybody’s interests. And so hopefully it’s a wake up call in that the industry players start getting more involved. And we would love to see I mean, we have.

So Blue Ribbon Coalition can use a limited amount of its resources to go and lobby for pieces of legislation and things like that. And it’s proportionate to our overall budget of how we operate. And so we would love to see people. We have a lot of plans to go promote the Outdoor American with Disabilities Act. We have a lot of spokespersons and folks we’ve met out in the among our membership of people who have disabilities. There would be great people to go get to Washington D.C. to go advocate to their members of Congress to support that bill.

And so we’d love for people to support an effort like that to go get that legislation passed. And that’s just that’d be just one small example of actually flexing a muscle that we should have and that we should exercise and we should use. And we’ll be watching all of that very closely though. We think there will be a lot of development, especially as courts. It’ll take a few years. The courts are going to have to strike down some follow up things on the basis of this. And then that’ll start waking everybody up to what needs to change. And then it’ll be.

I think it’s just a very different environment than what we’ve seen in the last 30 years. Wonderful. It sounds wonderful. I guess the tagline is so you’re saying there’s a chance now there’s there’s more chance than what was available for the last 30, 40 years. So let’s talk about funding. Let’s talk about how Blue Ribbon Coalition is funded because it sounds like to me you guys are going to be busy and spending lots of money for a number of years.

And hopefully you’re going to have the funds to do that. How do you guys get funding to be able to do this for us?

Yeah, so our primary funding base is actually our memberships. So just our dues from individuals. So your listeners joining for 50 bucks a year or we have a version that’s five bucks a month and you get enough people doing that. And that’s a pretty solid foundational base. And there’s definitely enough people in this industry in this sport to we could be a hundred times our size if everybody would just donate 50 bucks a year. That’s not that much like it’s almost a negligibly small amount. We try not to make it prohibitively expensive, but if everybody did it, we would be as big as the biggest environmental groups out there. So all you would have to do is go to share trails dot org and there’s a button or something on the join become a member, the joint member and 50 bucks a year is like nothing. I mean, that’s I mean, what was the thing they always say that it’s like a Starbucks coffee every day, you know, even at that, that’s going to be more than 50 bucks a year. So if you believe in having open trails and you want you don’t want to pay a lawyer directly to go against the government, this is your opportunity for little to nothing to help Blue Ribbon Coalition do this for you. And they’re going to need to be doing it for years.

So but now is an absolutely wonderful time because the Supreme Court has given us this opportunity to get rid of some of these laws. Now, there’s no guarantee because in my understanding is it’s moved from this administration groups of various three letter agencies back to the judicial branch. So the judge will be making the decision. So there’s no guarantee that they’ll make the right decision either. But it’s back the way the Constitution had framed it. It’s not there’s no guarantee because the Supreme Court spoke pretty decisively. The lower court judges are going to take that into account and they will start deciding things in line with what the Supreme Court has told them to do.

So as long as there are good cases, we think there’s a lot of good chances to succeed to the point where you said if you don’t want to hire your own lawyer, most people that are off-roading, if you get upset that some trail has been closed, you’re too late to hire the lawyer. Even if you had the money and wherewithal to do it, if you hadn’t been participating in the process up to that point meaningfully like what we do, you have no legal standing. You can’t you won’t even be able to show up in court and take advantage of this. So you have to have a group like us that’s been vigilantly watching this stuff for decades that has been establishing that legal standing and that’s and it is our special relations. What we do. The other way people support us is I know there’s thousands of jeep clubs and things like that across the country. The clubs become a member organization of BRC. In that sense, we represent your whole organization.

It’s usually a few hundred dollars. We have some clubs that join at a higher level where they do matching fundraising things for us and whatnot. And we get a ton of support from our member, the other organizations. And to me, that’s like the secret weapon of this off-roading industry is all these organically created clubs and organizations that just meet together because they’re friends and they have a shared interest.

And it’s surprising what that community is able to accomplish when they just as volunteers kind of put their mind to something and they’ve been very supportive of what we do. And then we have a lot of industry support. We have a lot of businesses that support us. Like it’s not usually at the level like Jeep or the big manufacturers. They’ve got a lot of other interests where we love their support. But the aftermarket shops, the people that are manufacturing the aftermarket parts and that whole culture of modifying your vehicles after the fact, we get a lot of support out of that level of the industry. We have some dealers that support us. We’ve been doing a series of it’s a book called The Lost Trails Guidebook where we go out and identify trails that are at risk of closure and put them in guidebooks so people can learn about them and go use them and kind of become advocates for those trails. And a lot of people just haven’t heard about, they’re not the popular trails. And we get a lot of sponsors for the guidebook at this point. So if there’s people that want to sponsor our Lost Trails Guidebook, we’d love to talk to you about the sponsorship opportunities there. And then a lot of people do these big events and the rallies and the off-road, the jamborees and the jamborees. They do all these events and a lot of times the groups that run those events donate a portion back to organizations like us. So when you go out to those organized rides and group events, a lot of times that’s one of the best ways to support us as well. And then you can just go to share trails.org and contact us or there’s a place on there that they can click and send an email or fill out a form and be a part of this. 100%. Yeah. It’s all there on the website. All right, Ben. So you know how the kids like the social media. You guys got to be on the social media. You have a picture of some, I saw you the other day talking about Chevron deference on Instagram probably a couple of weeks ago now and thought that was cool. So where can they find you guys at? Yeah. So Instagram is Blue Ribbon Coalition.

It’s probably one of our biggest, most active accounts right now. So if you’re on Instagram and you don’t follow us there, you’re missing out. We have a lot of posts that go viral there. We’ve we’ve actually killed some regulatory procedures through some of those posts, but we got enough comments in. There’s like a plan to create what we’re called natural asset companies, which were a new firm basically created on Wall Street. They would have been able to go up and buy up nature. And we got so many people fired up and commenting to the Securities and Exchange Commission of all places against that. The creation of these new types of companies on Wall Street. And we were part of the effort to kill that rule. So we’re actually getting a lot of things done on these social media accounts. And so if you’re on there, you’re kind of signing up to be part of the cause because we do a lot of good content out on Facebook. We’re also Blue Ribbon Coalition.

YouTube, we have a channel that’s called BRC TV. I think I gave you a link on your show notes and then TikTok. We have Blue Ribbon Coalition and that’s where we’re the most active. We have a Twitter account, but we just haven’t really tweeted much. We probably should, but it used to be a tweet. Now it’s now it’s called X. So are you Xing now whenever you send out a. Yeah, that’s probably why we should. Like now that we’re not going to get censored. I know. I know it’s wonderful to actually have a social media site that’s open for everybody.

Of course, there’s a big argument there about it’s not really open for everybody because it’s, you know, people that aren’t liberals can can say things.

So thank God for a free lawn. He’s been very entertaining in the space, the Tesla stuff. All that stuff is is very interesting. All right, Ben. Well, thank you very much for being here. We have to have you on more often because if we wait for the Supreme Court to do something, we’re going to be it’s going to be a long time. Between now and then, I think. Maybe one of the next ones will be us. Like we’re actually, we’re in the 10th circuit this September challenging the antiquities act shows how they make those big national monuments.

And so we’ll be doing a 10th circuit court of appeals in September with our challenge to the Biden expansions of the Bears Ears and Grant staircase of Sculani national monuments.

And we hope we prevail there. But if not, we know that that’s that’s one of those areas where the Supreme Court justices have signaled they’re kind of concerned with what presidents are doing. So right there’s that case. Then we also have a case in Idaho where we had a dirt biker who had been threatened with eight hundred thousand dollars in fines because he had gone and posted GoPro footage of him riding his bike on. That is just so stupid. This is like the Indians stealing their soul. But with pictures, it’s just so stupid. Yeah. And so we challenged the federal agency film permitting rules on First Amendment grounds. Yeah. And we’ve already won on our first round and getting a preliminary injunction in the state of Idaho in the district court there. And so Blue Ribbon Coalition and its members do not have to get film permits to film commercially on public land right now. Nice. So that’s anyway. So there’s we’ll see where that goes. But we think constitutional challenges like that always create interesting questions that are different than the typical administrative law things that we do. And we were already having good success in that court. The judge is seeing a lot of our concerns. And we think that that’ll be an interesting case as well.

Well, Ben, thank you so much for doing all this for us. You and the whole group there at Blue Ribbon Coalition. I know it’s not just you. And I’m going to go over and become a subscriber, a donator, whatever you call it, for Blue Ribbon Coalition today, just as soon as we get done with this interview. And I want to encourage everybody else to do it because now is a great time to make sure that there’s going to be trails open.

And I’m not saying that’s all they do, but Blue Ribbon Coalition. But think about it from the trail standpoint. Your kids, your grandkids, their kids. This is a great opportunity for them to be able to live the lifestyle that we live now. So do something about it. Help support this this business. Yeah. Thank you for the support. We’d love to have your listeners be a part of it. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks again to Ben Burr of Blue Ribbon Coalition. You can visit their website right now, sharetrails.org and be a supporter. Join their organization because they’re going to need the dollars to help get our trails reopened and keep others from being closed. So coming up next week, Ryan Fry of Bullet Point Mounting Solutions. I think you probably know these folks because they have great mounting solutions for your jeeps so that you can mount your phones, your GPS’s, your tablets, all kinds of things right there on the top of your dash and other other places. But you’ll hear that in the interview next week. And in the meantime, go to bulletpointmountingsolutions.com to get more information.

And that’s a wrap for today’s episode of the Jeep Talk Show. I want to give a big thank you to our special guests for joining us today and sharing their knowledge and experience with the Jeep community. Remember, we have five episodes a week and it’s understandable if you have missed past episodes. You can always find this on your favorite podcast, platform, player, etc. Are on our website and yes, on YouTube, every episode is in full living color video and audio. Well, I guess the audio could be colorful, but right there on YouTube. So go over there and like and subscribe. And if you’re already watching this video on YouTube, take the time to like and subscribe.

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