And....Moratorium Asked on Suits That Seek to Protect Species

[Tom Moritz]

From: tmoritz at amnh.org 
To: tmoritz at amnh.org 
Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Moratorium Asked on Suits That Seek to Protect
Species 
Message-Id: <20010412192017.92E9158A51 at email5.lga2.nytimes.com> 
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 15:20:17 -0400 (EDT) 


This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by tmoritz at amnh.org.

Moratorium Asked on Suits That Seek to Protect Species

By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, April 11 — The Bush administration has asked Congress to 
set aside, at least for a year, a provision of the Endangered 
Species Act that has been the main tool used by citizens' groups to 
win protection for plants and animals.
The request, spelled out in a section of the budget document that 
President Bush sent to Capitol Hill on Monday, would make it much 
more difficult for citizens to use the courts to force the Fish and 
Wildlife Service to act on petitions to list a species as 
endangered.
Officials at the Interior Department defended the request today as 
necessary to let an overburdened agency regain control of a mission 
that they said has increasingly been driven by the courts, with 
dozens of cases involving more than 400 species now on the dockets.
If Congress approves the plan, the Fish and Wildlife Service 
would devote its available money next year to listing the 
endangered-species cases it deemed to be top priorities, while 
being specifically barred from spending any money to carry out new 
court orders or settlements involving other plants or animals.
"We want a chance to establish our own priorities, instead of just 
waiting for another court order to roll across the transom," said 
Stephanie Hanna, an Interior department spokeswoman. Ms. Hanna said 
the department would decide next year whether to extend the request 
beyond the 2002 fiscal year.
The leaders of environmental groups, along with some Congressional 
Democrats, denounced the plan as one that would take power away 
from citizens and put it in the hands of an agency that they said 
had been reluctant to make the hard decisions involved in 
designating endangered species.
"If you didn't have the citizens' suits, you'd basically have the 
power brokers determining if you were going to save the salmon or 
the spotted owl, and that just doesn't make sense," Representative 
George Miller, Democrat of California, said today.
Democrats opposing the move invoked the threat of a filibuster to 
kill it. Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that 
"any and all" tactics would be considered to defeat the proposal.
The administration proposal reflects a longstanding battle over 
how far the government should go in determining what species are 
deserving of protection, with business and other property owners 
critical of the reach of the 1973 law. 
Under the administration plan, citizens could still petition the 
wildlife service with endangered-species requests, and to file suit 
in attempts to force action. But for next year, at least, the 
service would not be bound by deadlines requiring a prompt 
response, a change that would end the leverage citizens use to seek 
help from the courts.
The service would honor any court orders or settlements on 
endangered species in effect at the time the law was passed, a 
commitment that interior department officials said would consume 
the majority of this year's $8.7 million budget for the listings. 
But the prohibition on spending related to new court orders or 
settlement would be absolute, department officials said, leaving 
the balance of the funds to support the agency's own listings 
efforts.
Of more than 1,200 species that the wildlife service has listed as 
threatened, the vast majority — including the northern spotted owl 
and the Atlantic salmon — owe that status to legal pressure brought 
on the agency by outside groups.
At the same time, though, a proliferation of lawsuits in recent 
years has left decisions on 250 candidate species or their critical 
habitats still awaiting agency review. 
Despite that backlog, a memorandum circulated within the agency in 
November said resources had become so strapped that its own 
listings efforts were being suspended to provide officials the time 
and money to address the legal challenges.
Interior department officials today cited that Clinton 
administration warning in describing what they hoped to avoid 
during the new administration; their views were echoed by 
Congressional Republicans.
"Under the existing scenario, anybody can sue, and the limited 
resources of the department were spent defending the case," said 
Representative George P. Radanovich, a California Republican who 
heads a caucus of conservative Western lawmakers. "At the same 
time, a lot of people have been using the endangered species act 
not for the protection of endangered species, but for the 
advancement of a no-growth agenda."
In addition to 75 active lawsuits involving endangered species, 
the service is preparing to defend 86 more cases in which it has 
received notices of intent to sue. Projects the agency planned for 
this year included final designations of critical habitat for 180 
endangered species, with preliminary decisions on 240 more, but 
those were in danger of being swamped by the legal challenges.
Lawyers with experience in endangered-species cases said that if 
Congress grants the protection the administration seeks, it could 
not easily be overridden, even by a judge.
In a recent ruling in the case of Environmental Defense Center v. 
Babbitt, they noted, the United States Court of Appeals for the 
Ninth Circuit in San Francisco ruled in the government's favor to 
uphold a spending moratorium against other obligations related to 
endangered species.
For that reason, leaders of environmental groups that have 
successfully used the law were particularly vocal today in 
denouncing the administration proposal.
At Defenders of Wildlife, officials said the determination by the 
wildlife service came only after the group filed three challenges 
in court.
"One of the reasons that the Endangered Species Act works is that 
Congress gave citizens a right to petition and to sue," said Rodger 
Schlickeisen, the group's president. "Congress set those statutory 
deadlines on purpose because they knew that agencies would have a 
hard time acting on their own in an atmosphere of political 
controversy."
The administration's effort to seek changes in the 
endangered-species process comes as some Congressional Democrats 
have joined Republicans in saying that the act itself may need an 
overhaul.
In the House, Representative James V. Hansen, the Utah Republican 
who is chairman of the House Resources Committee, set up a 
bipartisan Endangered Species Act Working Group today to draft 
proposed changes to the law, which has been been due for 
reauthorization since 1991. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/12/politics/12SPEC.html?ex=988103217&ei=1&en=
64d82bd20088a496
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