Ammon Bundy, "man about town," talking water and housing in Oregon and Idaho

This piece out of Klamath Falls, Oregon about the West's water crisis caught my attention last month.  Emmas Marris reports in The Atlantic, under the headline, "The West Can End the Water Wars Now."  Here's the lede for the story, which doesn't focus on Bundy, but does provide important context:

[I]n the West, people are, by and large, aggrieved. This is not entirely their fault. Federal and state governments have made lots of promises to people in the West, or to their parents or grandparents. Some people were promised that their land would not be taken, while other people were promised free land. Some were told that they could withdraw water from this or that lake or river every year until the end of time, others that their right to hunt or fish on their territory would never be infringed.

But the natural abundance those promises were based on has been squandered by generations of mismanagement. In the Klamath Basin, in Southern Oregon and Northern California, where I live, Klamath tribal members haven’t been able to exercise their “exclusive right of taking fish in the streams and lakes,” as protected in a 1864 treaty, for decades, because the fish keep dying.

And here's the bit that sums up what Bundy is up to (note, it potentially involves violence):   

A handful of far-right agitators connected with the infamous anti-government cowboy Ammon Bundy spent $30,000 to buy a plot of land adjacent to the closed headgates of the main irrigation canal, and they are publicly threatening to force them open. The gates are controlled by the Bureau of Reclamation and blocked with bulkheads. Heavy machinery would be required to move them. The farmers Grant Knoll and Dan Nielsen are giving interviews from the shade of a large, circus-striped tent by the headgates: They see their promised water allocation as private property that the federal government has stolen from them.

And then Anita Chabria and Hailey Branson-Potts reported for the Los Angeles Times that Bundy, in suburban Boise, Idaho, was arguing that the shortage of housing was a reason to end public land ownership.  The headline is "Ammon Bundy seizes on housing shortage in new bid to take public lands in Idaho."  Here's a salient quote:

Bundy is reframing the decades-long but narrow fight of his father, Cliven Bundy, against the Bureau of Land Management — the other BLM, as it’s known here — into a platform with broader appeal. He wants to use the governorship to wrest ownership of federal land for state control. It’s a campaign aimed at voters dreaming of wide open spaces and homes they can afford, wrapped in an idealized view of western life where land and resources are limited only by an unwillingness to use them.

Neither America nor the Gem State, he told the crowd, can survive the liberal creep of growing cities or the economic toll of too few houses for too many people. To “keep Idaho Idaho,” as his slogan promises, growth needs to happen out instead of up, as he puts it.

The federal government is “forcing everybody down into big cities and where they’re just surviving,” Bundy said in a recent interview with The Times. He spoke from his home outside Boise on five acres of apple orchards in an agricultural area known as Treasure Valley, surrounded by public lands.

Of course, Bundy and his family have long pressed for an end to federal government ownership of land.  That's been their signature issue, as covered here, regarding the 2016 seizure of the Malheur Wildlife Reserve, and other issues.