What Eastern States Does

BLM East: Click here for a list of Programs

Michael D. Nedd, State Director
Terry Lewis, Chief, Office of External Affairs

The Bureau of Land Management's Eastern States became an official State Office on April 8, 1980, with responsibilities for managing the public lands and resources in the 31 states that are contiguous and east of the Mississippi River. Through the leadership of its State Directors during the last 22 years, Eastern States has conducted its programs with a clear mission in mind - responsible stewardship of the public treasures entrusted to our care.

Eastern States is an active, dynamic organization made up of a diverse workforce of 254 dedicated civil servants.

• We manage about 39 million acres of mineral estate, including substantial leasing for oil and gas, and environmentally sound development of coal, lead, zinc, limestone and phosphate.
• We maintain more than 9 million historic land title records dating back to 1787. In order to preserve these records, we are automating them to make the information easily accessible to the public on the Internet.
• We are the Nation's official surveyors, identifying, surveying, and maintaining legal boundaries on the Federal lands in the East, including our work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
• We are the primary adoption arm of the Wild Horse and Burro Program, with almost 17,000 wild horses and burros placed in good homes during the past 5 years.
• We manage a wide variety of valuable resources on about 30,000 acres of public lands, from irreplaceable cultural sites to unique habitats for threatened plant and animal species, located from the steamy swamps of Louisiana, to golden sand beachfronts in Florida, to pristine islands in the northwoods of Minnesota to highly visible sites near our Nation's Capitol at Meadowood Farm in Virginia and Douglas Point in Maryland.
• We have the only Type 1 BLM elite wildland fire fighting crew east of the Mississippi River, the Jackson (MS) Interagency Hotshot Crew.
• We also pride ourselves on working with thousands of invaluable partners, from minority schools to the Outdoor Writers Association of America, to provide environmental education and to make known the enormous opportunities that Americans own in their public lands.