U.S. Sued on Status of Rare Plant

Five environmental groups sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday over the status of a rare, dime-sized plant that has been thrust into bitter debates over two of Southern California’s biggest proposed developments.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., alleges the agency should be ordered to declare as endangered the San Fernando Valley spineflower. Thought to be extinct for 70 years until it was spotted in 1999, the flower is known to grow only at the sites of communities planned for Ahmanson Ranch in Ventura County and Newhall Ranch, 18 miles to the north, in Los Angeles County.

“It’s clearly in the path of development and extinction,” said John Buse, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Center in Ventura, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the groups.

The spineflower is officially one of several hundred “candidates” for endangered status.

Buse, however, called its candidacy “a legal limbo,” saying the designation gives the plant no protection and that no timetable has been set for determining whether it will ever be anything but a candidate.

In 2000, Fish and Wildlife Service officials denied a request by the city of Calabasas, an opponent of the 3,050-home Ahmanson Ranch project, that the spineflower be given endangered status on an emergency basis. At the time, the agency said it could not consider the request because of staffing and budget shortfalls.

The agency still has not done the work needed to determine whether the spineflower should be considered endangered, said Rick Farris, a Fish and Wildlife Service ecologist based in Ventura.

Among other things, Farris said, the agency must examine plans for the plant’s preservation by the developers of Ahmanson and Newhall.

With discussions ongoing over the state’s possible acquisition of Ahmanson as parkland, the threat to the spineflower there may be an academic question. But the tiny plants still loom large at Newhall Ranch, where developers plan nearly 21,000 homes.

The Newhall development was approved in May. Three months earlier Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley dropped an investigation into Newhall’s alleged bulldozing of stands of spineflowers and into allegations that it got cattle to graze on the plants by sprinkling them with alfalfa. In return, the developers agreed to set up a preserve for the remaining flowers. The relatively few lawsuits filed to secure endangered status frequently fail, Buse, of the Environmental Defense Center, said.

The plaintiffs are the California Native Plant Society, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Santa Clara River, Heal the Bay and Save Open Space/Santa Monica Mountains.