Pay the Piper Is Least Bell’s Vireo’s Costly Song

Attempts to hurdle the roadblock that has stalled myriad public and private construction projects in San Diego County hinge on finding new homes for a tiny band of endangered songbirds--the least Bell’s vireo.

But regional schemes to solve the problem have ruffled more feathers than governmental agencies had expected. One city, Oceanside, has indicated that it won’t join in a joint rescue attempt. Others are dragging their feet.

The county Board of Supervisors grudgingly gave tentative approval to a joint program after one board member pointed out that it would increase taxes to give birds a home, while the area’s homeless humans get no such break.

San Diego County has been designated one of the primary sites for preservation of riverside nesting areas for the tiny bird, which went on the federal register as an endangered species in 1986 when only about 300 pairs were found nationwide.

Now, federal wildlife officials have mandated that the bird’s riparian habitat must be preserved, no matter what human endeavor is involved. A dam, a freeway, a subdivision, a bridge cannot be started if it tramples on the diminishing turf containing a least Bell’s vireo nest.

On the local level, the San Diego Assn. of Governments is elbow-deep in developing and printing voluminous plans for vireo habitat preservation on the San Luis Rey, San Diego and Sweetwater rivers. Within these watersheds, considered by biologists as the most populous vireo habitats, appropriate nesting areas are being mapped for preservation, and sites for newly created vireo habitats are being studied.

‘Mitigation’ Costs

When development threatens the vireos’ haunts, Sandag’s “habitat conservation plan” will become the Bible used to referee the conflict between builder and bird and decide who will pay the bill for providing the “mitigation” costs for relocating the little gray songbirds out of the bulldozer’s path.

This regional approach is what has had county supervisors and other public officials grinding their teeth.

Board Chairman George Bailey can’t understand why San Diego County was picked as the place to mitigate the migratory bird’s habitat.

“I personally resent that this county becomes the habitat preserver for other parts of the state and country,” Bailey said recently. “We could get in a situation where two little birds are going to hold us up forever” on projects critically needed by human inhabitants.

Supervisor Brian Bilbray had another concern about the program: “Parkland and public access to it must be preserved for the people,” he contended. “There are people who love to push habitat management,” and those people, he suspects, “have a hidden agenda.”

“A lot of this is simply ridiculous,” Supervisor Susan Golding said. “It’s expensive and I don’t think it will work. Habitat preservation doesn’t take five years and multiple agencies to create.”

Under the environmental restrictions in force today, Mission Bay could never have been created and the many tourist amenities that dot the bayfront and Mission Valley could never have been built, she points out.

Nevertheless, the Board of Supervisors approved participating in Sandag’s plan pending a closer look at what it will cost and how much county staff time will be spent on it.

Mike McLaughlin, Sandag project manager for the riparian preservation program, has heard harsher criticism of the program.

“In the past, it was a lot easier to get things done,” McLaughlin acknowledged, “but the environmental damages were tremendous. Maybe, if we had done it right in those days, we wouldn’t be fighting for habitat now. Maybe the least Bell’s vireo wouldn’t be on the endangered species list.”

Birds Over People?

But why spend millions of dollars to preserve a tiny bird that few people have ever seen, when thousands of human beings are going hungry and homeless?

McLaughlin has a stock answer.

“We recognize that there are competing interests for public funds. This program doesn’t mean that you pump all your money into environmental measures and ignore the homeless. Obviously, we must do both.

“It’s not just the least Bell’s vireo that is involved. The vireo is carrying a message to the San Diego region: ‘I am becoming endangered. My habitat is disappearing.’

“All one has to do is take a trip up to Los Angeles to see what we will have lost,” he said, describing the miles of concrete-lined ditches that once were verdant river valleys. “We have a legacy to preserve the environment for future generations. If we preserve the riparian habitat for the vireo, we will be protecting it for everyone.”

Need a Solution

McLaughlin is a realist and he knows that the Comprehensive Species Management Plan nearing completion will succeed or fail based on the bottom line: Will it resolve the bureaucratic snafu that has delayed a dozen major public projects and countless private developments around the county for years? McLaughlin thinks it will.

The management plan offers a better, quicker, cheaper and much more sensible way to tackle a regional program that won’t go away, he stressed. The plans will be backed by assessment districts created to finance the acquisition, creation and maintenance of riverside wilderness areas where vireos can flourish, he said.

“What we are proposing is state . . . legislation (to create) a way of spreading the cost for something that benefits more than just the person’s property sitting right next to the river,” McLaughlin said. Otherwise, if the cost were not spread widely, each riverside property owner’s cost would be “astronomical.”

So, if Sandag officials are successful in getting local governments and agencies to join in, each county taxpayer may be giving a few pennies or even a few dollars each year to feather the least Bell’s vireos’ nests.

Despite the initial negative comments, McLaughlin is convinced that the county supervisors will find the Sandag program a more efficient way of meeting the federal mandate than by trying to do it themselves. He’s also sure that Oceanside authorities, when they realize they are on the hook for the cost of maintaining two major riparian habitats in the San Luis Rey River Valley, will opt for the management plan and its assessment district financing to save the city’s general tax funds.

‘Reinvent the Wheel’

At present, without the regional program in force, each agency or developer faced with dealing with the least Bell’s vireo must “reinvent the wheel,” McLaughlin said, finding their way through numerous governmental agencies, then attempting to create an alternative habitat as mitigation for the riverside acreage that is being destroyed.

John Rieger, district biologist for the state Department of Transportation, and his aide, Kate Baird, are experts in the field of creating riparian habitat.

When they have completed their task, a 7.2-acre vacant lot near the end of the Oceanside Airport runway will have become a dense tangle of willow trees and underbrush, brambles and weeds, a clone of the nearby nesting grounds of the least Bell’s vireo. Cost: $1.4 million. Rieger stresses that the cost is “atypical” because the project is a rush job, using full-grown and costly plants and trees.

Until the habitat is complete and “operational,” Caltrans cannot begin to remove nearby riverside growth that stands in the path of a highway bypass for California 76, a $14-million project designed to relieve congestion on Oceanside’s Mission Avenue, east from Interstate 15 into the San Luis Rey River Valley.

“It’s sort of the Disneyland approach, creating a full-grown version of vireo habitat, like the Jungle Cruise in Disneyland,” Rieger said.

Baird has been “tree hunting” up and down the valley, identifying 400 mature willows and other trees that will be dug up and moved, at $400 each, to the new site. These will be supplemented with nursery stock, native brush and plants. The final product will contain 4,000 plants and trees per acre.

The project’s planting and seeding must be completed by March 15, when the foliage will be coming out of winter dormancy.

In a year or two, after approval from a series of environmental and wildlife agencies, ending with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the new nesting site will face the ultimate test: Are least Bell’s vireos nesting there?

Nearby, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is constructing its own vireo habitat as mitigation for nesting areas usurped by a flood-control channel.

Upriver about 5 miles, Caltrans is constructing a second habitat of 5 acres to relocate the vireo from nests in the path of a new Bonsall Bridge.

For Rieger and Baird, the two Caltrans projects are only a warm-up for a major mitigation project that will arise to construct California 52 east across the San Diego River Valley to Santee.

Perhaps, by then, Rieger said, the coordinated regional plan will be operational.

Highways, dams and sand-mining operations are hit the hardest by the least Bell’s vireos’ presence.

“You can move a housing subdivision or redesign most projects to avoid sensitive areas, but a bridge or a dam or a mining operation has to go where it has to go,” Rieger said.

Projects on Hold

In the upper reaches of the San Dieguito Valley, the proposed Pamo Dam near Ramona is on indefinite hold, partly because of the vireo. In the South Bay, future Routes 54 and 125 must detour around the songbirds, and the developers of the massive Rancho San Diego must redesign their golf course.

On the Santa Margarita River in North County, Fallbrook Public Utility District workers are attempting to create their own version of riparian habitat to allow a long-stalled dam project to go forward.

Even in the Anza-Borrego Desert, the endangered bird has claimed its turf. Off-road vehicles have been banned from an unusually lush streamside area known as Lower Willows, which is the only access to Coyote Canyon, a popular destination for off-road enthusiasts.