With this whole no-bid Puerto Rico contract being awarded to his buddies in Whitefish from Montana, who have never generated a revenue of even $1M before, I agree that he's a scumbag. This situation as described in the article is distressing. PERC is a terrible organization and their arguments are self-fulfilling.

Herein lies the big challenge for the landowners and their defenders: Survey after survey has shown that the public hates the idea that someone can lock taxpayers out of public land, and that they’re suspicious of transferring control of such tracts to private enterprise. Nevertheless, Anderson and PERC deny that their position is out of step with public opinion, even casting it as pro-access. Their rationale is oblique: If the Forest Service insists the public has a right to use the trails, they say, private landowners will naturally rebel; numerous court battles will ensue, tying up the trails in years of litigation and costing the government millions of dollars. And as the cases proceed, the landowners will take steps to secure their property rights, blocking traffic on the trails until the mess is sorted out.

What a transparent pile of crap for an argument. They're gonna block the trails regardless of whether or not the Forest Service fights them. Some folks should make a trip to Montana with a pair of bolt cutters and go big fence hunting.

Oh there's also this:

PERC’s affiliation with politically connected outfitters that stand to profit if trails are closed bolsters the sense, to Wilson and others confronting locked gates, that a void in coherent policy about public land management is being filled by cronyism that rewards wealth and connections above all else. Another co-owner of the Wonder Ranch, Frank-Paul King, a friend and former student of Anderson’s, served on PERC’s board. Hudson, the man who got Representative Sessions involved, is King’s brother-in-law, and he’s also a board member and the former president of the Dallas Safari Club, a group that made national headlines in 2014 when it auctioned off a trip to Africa to hunt an endangered rhinoceros. (The winning bidder, who paid $350,000, traveled to Namibia and shot a black rhino bull, an animal the club said had threatened the rest of the herd.) The Dallas Safari Club has granted PERC funding for, among other things, a “Montana project to help ranchers preserve private land so that hunters and fishermen can have access to public lands,” according to its newsletter.

Garbage and hypocrisy. Paying lip service to conservation while killing endangered animals.