Page:John Sturgeon v. Bert Frost, in his official capacity as Alaska Regional Director of the National Park Service.pdf/24

20 And for that reason, Section 103(c)’s third sentence provides a kind of escape hatch—for times when the Park Service believes regulation of the inholdings is needed. In that event, “the Secretary may acquire such lands” from “the State, a Native Corporation, or other owner.” §3103(c). (As noted earlier, facilitating those acquisitions was one reason Congress put non-federal lands inside park boundaries in the first instance. See supra, at 7.) When the Secretary makes such a purchase, the newly federal land “become[s] part of the [system] unit.” §3101(c). And the Park Service may then “administer[]” the land just as it does (in the second sentence’s phrase) the other “public lands within such units.” Ibid. In thus providing a way out of the Section’s first two sentences, the third underlines what they are doing: insulating the state, Native, or private lands that ANILCA enclosed in national parks from new and unexpected regulation. In sum, those lands may be regulated only as they could have been before ANILCA’s enactment, unless and until bought by the Federal Government.

The Park Service interprets Section 103(c) differently, relying wholly on its second sentence and mostly on the single word “solely” there. True enough, the Service acknowledges, that anxiety about how it would regulate inholdings was “really what drove [Section] 103(c).” Tr. of Oral Arg. 46; see supra, at 9, 17. But still, the Service argues, the Section’s second sentence exempts those non-public lands from only “one particular class of Park Service regulations”—to wit, rules “‘applicable solely to public lands.’” Brief for Respondents 30 (quoting and adding emphasis to §3103(c)). In other words, if a Park Service regulation on its face applies only (“solely”) to public lands,