Bully EPA’s air rules over all -- Rogue agency hands over a Wyoming town to Indian tribes -- By Robert Knight, The Washington Times

With breathtaking mountains, constant wind and a tiny carbon footprint, Wyoming has some of the prettiest scenery and cleanest air in the nation.

Wyoming ranks 10th among the states in size, but with only 580,000 people — fewer than the city of Las Vegas — it's only 49th in population density. You can throw a lot of rocks and not hit anybody — for miles.
You might think that it would be the last place that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would play the federal bully by using air-quality mandates. You'd be wrong.

In December, the EPA effectively seized about 1 million acres of land, including the entire central Wyoming town of Riverton, and put it under the authority of the Wind River Indian Reservation.

The agency did so by granting a "Treatment as a State" application from the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes to get funding for air-quality monitoring under the Clean Air Act.

In its approval of the application, the EPA granted the tribes' claim that an act of Congress in 1905 was inconclusive about the size of the reservation. So the EPA decided to put the town under reservation authority.

The EPA was established in 1970 under President Nixon with a mandate to clean up the nation's air and water, not to start divvying up land parcels. In issuing its edict, the rogue federal agency overturned 109 years of legal history.

Now, Riverton's approximately 10,000 residents are in a legal no man's land, wondering whether to move, to adapt to life on the reservation, or to hunker down and prepare for civil disobedience. Most remain somewhat confident that the courts will straighten it out. A few opportunists are operating, though.

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