Spending inordinate amounts of time carrying a shotgun and following a pointing dog in that country over the last 15 years is where my perspective comes from. Being friendly and talking to folks, eating and staying in the surrounding communities, hunting public land and block management.
The only people that like the APR are tourists. The locals overwhelmingly don't like their new neighbors.
Do you have any actual experience in those communities? What percentage of their neighbors would you say are "open"?
It appears that the APR was not following federal rules as to grazing on our public lands which is why they lost those rights.
They are looking for a new community liaison to work with the local ranchers if you are interested.
They were fine with the blm until the new governor of MT threw a fit along with the ranching lobby and got the rules changed.
Locally when the state got a new park on the John day river at cottonwood the locals all hated that too.
Anything new and different is typically looked down upon in small town rural America, just an observation I’ve made over the years.