The State Board of Land Commissioners has requested that the Idaho Department of Lands (IDL) move forward with seeking a potential land swap with the federal government. The potential exchange still has a long way to go, but locals in McCall are supporting the exchange.
The proposal would trade 16,000 acres of valuable endowment land surrounding Payette Lake to the Forest Service for 150,000 acres of timberland in potentially four different national forests in Idaho.
Check out the video to learn more about this potential land swap
The IDL manages endowment land with the requirement of raising as much money as they can for beneficiaries, including the public schools and other public services. The land surrounding Payette Lake has underperformed in this aspect.
"The idea is to trade out of that ground and pick up an equal amount of value from the U.S. Forest Service in southern Idaho as well as up in [the] northern part of the state," said Dustin Miller with IDL. "We really view this as a big win for the endowment beneficiaries and the public."
This land has been front and center in neighborhood conversations since 2020, when Trident Holdings LLC attempted to gain ownership of the land for future development. Ultimately, the land board rejected the proposal, but the three-year ordeal worried a lot of people in McCall and Valley County.
"It really kind of gave everybody a scare, it was a shot across the bow," recalled Craig Utter, with the Payette Land Trust. "It really brought the community together. We looked into other alternatives to having this land move into private ownership, and one of those was to swap it with the Forest Service."
The Trident Holdings saga led to the creation of United Payette, a group of several different stakeholders who came together to protect this land from privatization. United Payette, which includes Craig Utter, believes this is a good deal for many different reasons.
"It’s a real win, win, win situation," said Utter. "It’s a win for the forest service because there is a continuity of management, it is a win for Idaho because Payette Lake is a gem at the top of the watershed, it’s a win for the endowment, and it’s a win for Valley County and the people that grew up here."
United Payette funded a study in 2025 that found 66% of people surveyed support the land exchange. It also found that 91% are concerned about the privatization of land and 99% believe that residential development does not provide significant benefit to endowment lands.
The Idaho Department of Lands also told us they are in the process of setting up public meetings and having a public comment period, even though they are not required to by law. However, this proposal still has a long way to go, and IDL will have to get Congressional approval to complete the swap.
"We have started big, looking at a 10-to-1 exchange, but that is subject to change over time," explained Miller. "We have permission from the Board of Land Commissioners to continue to dig in further, and we will be able to evaluate exactly what this is going to look like. We will certainly need to keep working with our friends in Congress."
But this proposal isn't the only option. The Idaho Department of Lands possesses three other proposals in which the state would keep a portion of the land.
First, they will see if the initial land swap proposal passes congressional muster.
