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For the past month and a half, about 40 people have been meeting to organize opposition to a proposed Emerald Mountain land swap. Most are property owners who would lose access to neighboring public lands if the deal goes through. They are working diligently to protect as much as possible of about 19,000 Bureau of Land Management acres proposed for sale to private owners.

The group's concerns are reasonable, but its approach is not.

At its meeting Tuesday, Citizens to Save Our Public Land shared the work it has done so far on a formal proposal to the BLM. Among its key requests, the group is asking that all parcels, regardless of size, with public access via county roads or the Routt National Forest be removed from the proposed sale list, and that the BLM require unanimous agreement from all property owners adjacent to a parcel before it can be traded.

The request to remove all parcels with public access would delete nearly 4,000 acres from consideration. While that 4,000 acres would include some parcels that are of legitimate public concern, it is so broad-reaching that it also could eliminate many smaller ones that are ideal for this type of exchange. Abutting a county road does not, on its own, mean a piece of property is being widely used or is valuable to the public.

The Emerald Mountain Partnership developed a set of criteria during its efforts to identify ideal acreage for trade from the BLM's list of about 40,000 acres identified as unmanageable and ideal for sale.

The citizens group would be wise to take a similar approach. By setting a more specific set of standards, the group can winnow its list and strengthen its argument for the publicly accessible parcels it most wants to save.

In deciding how parcels considered appropriate for trade would be offered to the public, the partnership came up with the idea of offering BLM lands surrounded by multiple landowners to the person owning more than 50 percent of bordering property, a plan we agree prevents smaller property owners from getting a fair shake at ownership. However, the citizens group's unanimous-agreement proposal could allow one owner to veto a deal all others agree to, a situation that could ultimately and unfairly jeopardize the land swap as a whole.

Rather than create a blanket policy with potentially disastrous consequences, such concerns would be better addressed in the context of the bureaucratic process that the proposal must go through before it is approved by the federal government.

Although the Emerald Mountain land swap will hurt those landowners who have long enjoyed the perks of living next to lightly used public land, it will benefit a much larger number of people. If Emerald Mountain can be transferred successfully to BLM control, it will be linked to existing trails on Howelsen Hill and opened to the public for recreation, including limited hunting, as well as its traditional grazing and wildlife uses.

In order to succeed, the citizens group must demonstrate that the parcels it seeks to retain as public land serve a greater public good.