Wetlands backpedal gets feds sued

The Butte Environmental Council is being joined by the California Native Plant Society and Defenders of Wildlife in a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its director in a lawsuit set to be filed in U.S. District Court on Jan. 15.

Barbara Vlamis, executive director of the Butte Environmental Council, said the suit alleges that the agencies violated the Endangered Species Act and relied on a flawed economic analysis in excluding acreage and wetlands species.

After several local hearings and biologists’ research over the past three years, the Sacramento office of the USFWS proposed defining critical habitat for 15 vernal-pool species on 1.7 million acres in California and Southern Oregon, including 69,000 acres in Butte County, where endangered Butte County meadowfoam and fairy shrimp dwell. But between the time the document got to Washington, D.C., and the time it reached the Federal Register on Aug. 6, 2003, 1 million acres and two species had been dropped from the maps. Six counties, including Butte, were excluded altogether.

In justifying their decision, Department of the Interior officials used their only legal out and claimed that designating the habitat would result in economic hardship for the surrounding communities—$1.3 billion in losses due to increased costs to develop land.

BEC quickly filed what’s called a 60-day letter of intent to sue, to which the federal agencies had no response.

The designation was intended to identify which geographical areas host endangered species, so developers would know going in what was already allowed under the law; it didn’t change the rules for building at all.

Carol Witham, president of the Sacramento-based California Native Plants Society, said if the designation stands as-is, “We’ll end up with significantly more habitat destruction in the typical project-by-project, piecemeal fashion.”

In February 2001, BEC secured a court order that forced the federal agencies to develop the critical-habitat plan. Vlamis is optimistic that this time, too, the courts will see the side of the environmentalists. "The courts have followed the letter of the law pretty strictly," she said.