NM Earth haters now supporting private land buyouts

Over a half million wildfires are started by arsonists every year in the US and if you live in the wildland-urban interface government can't always protect you from your own stupidity. 

Southern and southeastern New Mexico is home to many descendants of the Confederacy who back a convicted Republican felon as unitary executive and are quick to point fingers at the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management for wildfires. So, Earth haters funded by the Koch and DeVos cabals through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund and scattered in the American West derailed President Joe Biden's America the Beautiful Initiative. Herr Trump's Interior secretaries blame wildfires in the West on “radical environmentalists” despite most acres burn on private ranch land in Republican counties. 

Today, the Seven Cabins Fire in the Capitan Mountain Wilderness has burned some 32,000 acres and is still growing but the fire itself isn't the only hazard because flooding can compound the threats to recovery.

With help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Lincoln County is offering to purchase at-risk properties at pre-damage rates and demolish or relocate the houses, permanently converting the land into open space to act as a buffer against future floods. With $235 million in funding secured, officials hope to buy some 400 properties from willing sellers — a proposal that could dramatically reshape the 8,000-person town. Ruidoso is a conservative place, not one where you’d expect leaders to welcome what some Facebook commenters have deemed a government “land grab.” Now, Ruidoso’s mayor estimates that recovery could cost a billion dollars. Even with tens of millions promised in federal aid, it didn’t seem responsible, fiscally or otherwise, to keep rebuilding in areas that would flood again and again. [Lincoln County, New Mexico, wants to turn flood-prone properties into public land]