The Senate Natural Resources Committee advanced a bill Wednesday that would bar the Iowa Department of Natural Resources from purchasing land at auction.

Senate Study Bill 1198 would prohibit DNR from acquiring land in Iowa unless it is from a willing donor or seller.

The bill would also stop DNR from purchasing land above the appraised value from a nonprofit corporation that had purchased the land from auction.

“We’ve been down this path before,” Sen. Tom Shipley said in his opening remarks on the bill, which resembles bills from past legislative sessions.

Shipley said there are a number of people in his district, in southwestern Iowa, who are “very unhappy” with the state and federal government’s “overstep” of land ownership and control.

“I have yet to get more than one email from my district that’s … opposed to us doing this,” Shipley said.

Sen. Mike Zimmer, D-DeWitt, said his inbox has been “jammed” with comments from constituents opposed to the bill. Zimmer said some of these emails said the bill intruded on individual property rights.

“If an owner wants to sell their property to whomever they want to do, they should have that right to do that,” Zimmer said. “On the rare occasion that the DNR might be able to put together a financial package to actually show up to an auction and bid on a piece of ground, they should be able to do that.”

Shipley clarified the bill does not restrict a seller from willingly selling to the DNR, and also said the DNR has not bought land at auction for 20 years.

Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott, D-West Des Moines, opposed the bill and it would take “a lot of years” and “a lot of money” for the DNR to become a “real threat” in terms of land ownership.

According to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, the State of Iowa owns around 400,000 acres of land, which equates to roughly 1% of Iowa’s nearly 36 million acres of land.

“What I hear from Iowans repeatedly over and over, the one thing that they want more than anything is more access to public land for recreation, for hunting, for fishing,” Trone Garriott said. “It’s something that Iowans continue to show up for and speak out for … so every time bills like this show up, I gotta vote no.”

Trone Garriott, Zimmer and committee ranking Democrat Sen. Art Staed voted no on the bill, which passed with an amendment striking a section that provided an exemption to auction purchases if it advanced a conservation or recreation plan and was approved by the Natural Resources Commission.