Commentary: Public Interest Tests: Rural Interests in Land and Resource Decision-Making
Commentary by Katelyn Rich
Katelyn Rich is from Colorado and graduated from the University of Nebraska College of Law in 2026. She grew up interested in rural places from her regular visits to western Nebraska and developed a further interest in rural issues after interning at a rural law practice during college. Katelyn will spend time after law school in a judicial clerkship before practicing law in Nebraska.
Like all Commentary here on the Rural Review, this post expresses the personal opinions of the author.
A rural landowner in Nebraska decries the use of eminent domain to build an electrical transmission line “through the view from his dream doorstep” on a piece of family land. Rural landowners in Iowa push for a bill to exclude construction of electrical transmission using eminent domain. A rural community in Nevada rallies against the development of solar panel farms on nearby federal land that surrounds their homes. Why do so many rural residents oppose land and resource use projects, such as energy development?
One commonality in each of these conflicts is the type of resource at issue – land and natural resources – which, because they are accessible to large groups of people and “vulnerable to depletion,” require collective management. This commentary explores literature surrounding rural resentment, particularly as it relates to land and natural resources management. Against this backdrop, I suggest that the one legal means of engaging in collective management, “public interest” tests, exacerbate this rural resentment even where designed to meet legitimate ends.
Statutory public interest tests are statutory requirements which mandate that land and resource use decisions be supported by a political finding that the proposed use or allocation is in the public interest, public necessity, or public use. This means these tests seek to ensure the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. In most instances, from the perspective of state and federal policymakers, rural stakeholders are greatly outnumbered by their non-rural counterparts.
This reality results in the exclusion of the legitimate objections raised by rural stakeholders in opposition to these projects. Rural opposition is often rooted in concern regarding rural extraction, meaning resources are extracted from rural areas for the benefit of non-rural residents. As a result, rural Americans are conscious of being overlooked, resulting in growing disillusionment and the “sense that decision makers routinely ignore rural places.” A review of literature exploring “rural resentment” reveals that these feelings are particularly salient in the context of land and natural resource decision-making.
Understanding Rural Opposition
Why do rural stakeholders feel overlooked in land and natural resource decision-making? First, extractive projects and developments are more likely to be sited in rural areas to provide important services to “concentrated, highly populated areas.” For example, water allocation increasingly seeks to “extract[] agricultural water supplies from remote regions and redirect[] them to fast-growing, thirsty cities.” One study on solar panel development similarly found that rural residents in upstate New York believed that the projects were “extractive,” placing a burden on rural communities without “adequate recognition and compensation.” This dynamic suggests that rural communities, who bear the consequences of these projects, are losing out to urban populations who reap the benefits without bearing the costs.
Second, rural stakeholders often feel a general sense of “powerlessness” and “bullying” in interactions with government agencies. Rural communities frequently view collaboration with agency officials as incentivized only by bureaucratic requirements and not from a genuine interest in addressing community concerns. For example, a review of the sentiments surrounding public meetings conducted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in a community in Georgia were perceived as “scripted actions defined by bureaucratic rules.”
Third, as Terrence J. Centner explains in a forthcoming article in the Kentucky Law Journal, these challenges are compounded when projects are pursued by organizations who prioritize broader economic impacts for non-rural communities over the experiences of those living in rural spaces. This contributes to the growing sense of general “disenfranchisement and resentment” amongst rural communities.
Place-Based Attachments and Growing Rural Resentment
Uniquely deep place-based attachments felt by rural residents further informs rural opposition. As such, this rural opposition to land and resource development projects is motivated by more than the self-interest of a few disgruntled landowners. Instead, in recent years it has become clear that there is a “shared rural identity” in opposition to environmental regulation that “informs attitudes and behaviors that are consistent across rural geographies, industries, and communities,” especially in the context of water, land, and energy.
Literature on the growing urban-rural divide, particularly related to how rurality impacts political behavior, has expanded since the 2016 election. Studies seeking to understand the growing divide conclude that rural voters and interest holders see themselves as the minority or “out group.” These feelings run deep in the context of land and resource decision-making, where implementation of public interest tests generally weigh against the interests of rural stakeholders. This leads to “powerful place-based identities” that influence opinions on every aspect of political decision-making. Studies indicate that rural communities view themselves as “fundamentally different from urbanites in terms of lifestyles, values, and work ethic,” which generates resistance and skepticism of governance from places like Washington DC and state capitals, which are not themselves rural. All these factors lead to a growing sense of resentment amongst rural residents towards governance and the feeling of being left behind.
Rural Americans have extraordinarily close relationships with the land they live on as many rely on the land for their livelihoods and harbor “a sense of legacy and stewardship[.]” This informs rural values, which are aligned with environmental stewardship, a strong connection to nature, and particularly strong place-based identities as compared to their urban counterparts. In short, rural residents feel deep connections to the land they live on and will demonstrate significant opposition to extractive projects that supplant individualized and rural community decision-making about land and natural resource use.
These realities raise an important consideration: when rural stakeholders feel consistently overlooked and burdened with extraction, they will grow increasingly hostile to land and resource development projects perpetuating this extraction. Statutory public interest tests may exacerbate these feelings by guiding decision-making to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people, often to the exclusion of rural stakeholders. A look to the real-world application of these laws illuminates this rural exclusion.
Case Studies Demonstrating the Impact of Public Interest Tests
To better understand how public interest tests operate in the land and natural resources space, I considered the judicial review of public interest determinations under three different statutory frameworks: state water laws in Nebraska, Federal Policy Land Management statutes for federal public land exchanges, and public use findings in Iowa condemning public land for electrical transmission line construction.
In the water law context, one case perfectly illustrates how public interest tests are designed to overcome minority opposition to meet a broader societal need. The Nebraska Supreme Court, in accordance with state public interest laws, approved of a large water appropriation for municipal use in the City of Omaha. This decision came over objections from five agricultural landowners in then-rural Sarpy County. While this was a blow for the rural landowners, securing a steady water supply for a large nearby municipality likely serves the purpose of the public interest test: to provide water for the greater public, despite minority opposition.
Conversely, a federal court decision reviewing a federal land exchange under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) provides an example of the risks that arise when agency decision-makers and courts less clearly balance competing interests. A group of homeowners outside city limits in rural Shasta County, California, challenged a federal exchange of a public parcel of land to a private company for development. Despite landowner concerns that private ownership would exclude them from access to previously publicly owned land, which they accessed for recreation and enjoyment, the court perfunctorily concluded that the exchange was sufficient to meet the public interest requirement. The resulting outcome benefited one private development company at the expense of an entire rural communities’ interest in land use.
Similarly, the condemnation of private lands to provide for construction of electrical transmission lines is another example of rural exclusion. Under Iowa law, a condemnation is appropriate for this purpose upon a finding that “th[e] new transmission line is needed within the state to meet reliability needs, obtain lower electricity prices by reducing congestion or meet state-mandated public policy goals.” This test almost always favors construction, regardless of opposing interests.
For example, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the approval of the IUC to allow condemnation of a private landowner’s land to build 3.53 miles of electric transmission lines to support a new data center for Microsoft in West Des Moines. The landowner challenged the public use finding, arguing that because the lines were being constructed to serve a single private customer—Microsoft—there is no way the project was for a public use. The court instead upheld the decision of the board on the basis that the “planned improvements will also benefit current and future customers other than just Microsoft.” Although it was clear that “the most immediate need for the project is to satisfy the demands created by Microsoft’s new data center,” the public use finding was supported by a conclusion that “accommodating occurring and anticipating load growth, [] reasonably assures the availability, quality, and reliability of service.” Rural landowners who opposed construction of the electrical transmission lines across their property lost out to the development of electrical access for a single company.
Key Takeaways and Implications of Rural Exclusion
These examples illustrate the potential impact of statutory public interest tests. In all three examples, rural stakeholder opposition lost out to other interests. In the municipal water case, it is undeniable that the protection of water interests for a large municipality served a greater number of people despite the rural stakeholders who opposed the project. However, in the Shasta County and the Iowa transmission lines cases, whether overriding rural interests resulted in a benefit for the greater good is unclear. Ultimately, whether the statutory public interest tests meet the purpose of providing the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people or not, rural exclusion will continue to contribute to rural resentment.
Where rural exclusion is still necessary to develop projects for the greater public interest, we must nonetheless recognize how it feeds alienation of these rural interests which further entrenches rural resentment. Rural exclusion from land and resource decision-making will not lessen the urban-rural divide which has been the focus of recent political literature exploring the rural vote in the aftermath of the 2016 election—it will expand it. One example of the continuing divide might be found in rural opposition to green energy projects, which has prompted confusion from green energy advocates who view green energy as aligned with rural interests in land conservation. This confusion may be dispelled with the understanding that rural attitudes may become increasingly hostile to solar projects when rural stakeholder concerns are excluded from the project construction decision-making process.
Against this backdrop, it is necessary to view rural opposition to extractive land and resource projects as more than close-minded individualized opposition. Characterizations of rural stakeholders opposing solar panel projects or other development projects as uneducated or misinformed might overlook the impact of rural exclusion in decision-making. However necessary public interest tests may be in land and natural resource decision-making and development, exclusion can contribute to a sense of alienation from important and disproportionately impactful decision-making. Recognizing this is essential to understanding broader attitudes about these projects.
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