JimmyHoffa, that's a good question. I don't know if there have been any such attempts (and I suspect you may have been posing a rhetorical question anyway).
But your point about state parks continuing to struggle makes me even less interested in federal-to-state tranfer of lands. If they cannot keep things out of the red, even with the addition of increased fees and decreased services and access, I wouldn't predict that things would get better with more land to manage. Unless, of course, they bypassed the interests of hunters and other outdoor enthusiasts who have recreated, worked, and traveled on those federal public lands for decades.
I will do everything I can as a citizen to oppose the transfer of federal lands to states, but I heartily agree with BigTex that it would be wonderful to see some land exchanges that would reduce the checkerboarding that prevents the public from accessing public lands.
By the way, I do hunt DNR and WDFW, and I have had success on state land, but the vast tracts of now-federal forestland would be in real jeopardy if a state acquired it and then hit lean(er) times. Big oil, mining, and timber would come a knockin' and what was land that formerly belonged to all U.S. citizens would never be available in the ways it has been for decades. That's not fear, it's logic.
The feds are far from perfect, but because the mission is different than individual states, they can, thankfully, hold the corporate tycoons at bay. By the way, I realize we all need wood, oil, and minerals. I am not anti-extraction, per se. But the large corporations are no one's friend, in the end--not even the friends of the loggers, mill workers, miners, geologists (like my own brother) who work in our local communities in the West.
John
