Where Growth Meets Wildlife : Habitat Plans Seek Firmer Rules on Species Protection

Confronted with criticism from some scientists and environmental groups, the Clinton administration is promising to improve the program that tries to strike a compromise between economic growth and the Endangered Species Act.

That program to date has produced more than 240 conservation plans nationwide, from Orange County’s coastal hills to the Headwaters redwood forests in Northern California. Another 200 such pacts--including major plans in southern Orange County and San Diego County--are being designed.

The conservation plans are supposed to protect wildlife as diverse as the California gnatcatcher songbird in Orange County, the Northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest and rare salmon and seabirds in the Headwaters Forest.

Still, a growing number of scientists and environmentalists fear such plans are crafted too much by politics and too little by the needs of rare plants and animals. “We can provide assurances to the landowner, but we need assurances for the species,” said Laura Hood of Defenders of Wildlife.

Now the federal government is proposing changes in the plans with guidelines that would tighten oversight rules and require specific goals for how wildlife would benefit. The public would be given more time to study and comment on so-called habitat conservation plans, or HCPs.

Some developer groups generally approve of the changes, but environmentalists appear more wary, fearing they will not be enforced. The proposals are “a step in the right direction,” said Hood, but she hopes federal employees will indeed enforce the guidelines.

The public has until May 10 to comment on the proposed changes, published in the Federal Register on March 9.

“I think they’re very significant,” said E. LaVerne Smith, chief of the Division of Endangered Species at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which developed the changes in tandem with the National Marine Fisheries Service. The two agencies oversee the rare animals, plants and fish.

The key premise of these habitat plans is that clashes between industry and environmentalists can be averted through pacts negotiated to preserve some ecologically fragile land for rare wildlife. At the same time, such plans--championed by U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt--ease Endangered Species Act restrictions on other land, allowing home building and lumbering there to proceed.

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Among key changes proposed by the Clinton administration for the plans:

* requiring measurable biological goals and objectives. For instance, plans might lay out the population numbers needed for a rare bird or plant, or the acres of vegetation needed to sustain it;

* a flexible system of managing preserve land, so that it can change as more is learned about rare species;

* a monitoring program based on solid scientific findings;

* guidelines for determining how long a habitat plan will remain in place;

* longer public comment periods for most such plans.

If approved, the changes could produce more exacting goals for preserving plants and animals in two massive habitat plans now being developed in South County and northern San Diego County.

But no alterations would be required in existing plans, such as Orange County’s 1996 central-coastal pact or the brand-new Headwaters redwood forests plan signed March 1.

The new proposals won kudos from the Foundation for Habitat Conservation, a Seattle-based nonprofit group largely representing timber companies in the Pacific Northwest.

“Many of the recent HCPs include those principles, and, in the future, we think these principles will increase the public’s confidence in the ability of private landowners and the U.S. government to protect habitat under HCPs,” said the group’s president, Robert Jirsa, who also is an executive with Plum Creek Timber Co. The company spearheaded a mammoth habitat plan in 1996 in the Pacific Northwest forests.

“Those revisions reflect the evolution of the habitat conservation planning program,” added Rob Thornton, an Orange County-based attorney who has worked on more than a dozen such plans, representing Pacific Lumber Co. in the Headwaters negotiations.

The Headwaters plan already incorporates many of the proposed changes, Thornton said.

Some environmental groups, however, were more guarded.

“I think it’s important that they’re starting to grapple with the process,” said John Kostyack, counsel with the National Wildlife Federation in Washington.

But he is disappointed that regulators are altering mere guidelines, saying that his group will press for changes that would have the force of law. “It’s an open question,” he said, “how much in this plan is going to be enforceable.”

His views were echoed by Hood at Defenders of Wildlife. “A lot of it is rather vague,” Hood said. “To some extent, it has to be, because HCPs have to be flexible. But we’d like to see more specific language.”

At Fish and Wildlife in Washington, Smith said her agency takes the proposed guidelines seriously.

“We see these now as requirements as far as HCPs are concerned,” Smith said.

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In her view, the most significant change is a new insistence on biological goals. In short, new plans must state in biological terms “what are we trying to achieve for the species, and how does the HCP achieve these goals,” she said.

The changes come amid a chorus of complaints that many existing plans lack firm guidelines. The largest scientific study of habitat plans, released this winter, concluded that planners often lack key scientific data.

That study was led by Peter Kareiva, then a University of Washington professor of zoology and now a scientist with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The new guidelines “represent a good initiative,” Kareiva said. But to do such plans well requires resources, he said.

“Everyone likes to talk about ‘win-win’ situations, but this feel-good phrase glosses over the fact that these things have costs and require sacrifices,” Kareiva said. He added that he hopes federal agencies are given the resources they need to carry out what he called “a good science-based HCP program.”

“You can have all the guidelines you want, but without the science, it still cannot be done. And the science will cost money” to design plans and measure their effectiveness, he said.

At Fish and Wildlife headquarters in Washington, Smith said that her agency has requested $10 million in the next federal budget so that states can help with habitat plan development, and another $10 million so that the agency can participate more in creating habitat plans.

Also key to the guidelines is a requirement for longer public-comment periods for habitat plans.

Some Orange County residents complained in 1996 that they had too little time to scrutinize the sweeping pact with the Irvine Co. and other landowners that created a 37,000-acre preserve in central and coastal Orange County.

Nature Conservancy biologist Trisha Smith, a key figure in managing the Orange County preserve, said the new guidelines appear to be “front-loading” the process of creating such plans, requiring more detail at the start on exactly what kind of monitoring and management will be needed.

She praised that approach, saying the 1996 plan did not include extensive monitoring requirements.

“We have now spent a year and a half working with biological experts developing a monitoring plan,” Smith said. “It would have been helpful if the [plan] had specifically addressed monitoring requirements in a well-thought-out way.”

More information about the draft guidelines can be found on the Web at https://www.fws.gov/r9endspp/hcp/hcp.html