Washington – Tom Taylor is spending $3 million of his company’s money to avoid building houses on a mouse.
Taylor, director of operations for La Plata Investments, says that’s what the Endangered Species Act will force his 22-employee company to spend to preserve and improve habitat for the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse in communities it is developing north of Colorado Springs.
It’s one reason Taylor is glad to see some congressional lawmakers moving to overhaul the law – a cornerstone of the nation’s system of environmental regulation – after 32 years.
“If you want to enlist the people who own the property (in) the protection of the species, there needs to be some incentives given,” Taylor said.
Ranchers, loggers and developers such as Taylor have complained for years that the Endangered Species Act unfairly saddles landowners with the cost of protecting species.
Their complaints bore fruit last week when House Resources Committee chairman Richard Pombo pushed a plan through the panel to scale back the government’s power to regulate land to save species from extinction. The full House could vote on the bill as early as this week.
Pombo’s bill would sharply curtail the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s ability to regulate land.
Under the measure, landowners would be compensated if development of their property were restricted under the act, and they could earn grant money for acting voluntarily to protect endangered species. Projects could be exempted from the act if regulators failed to meet a 90-day deadline for objections to development proposals.
The sudden action after years of debate highlights a growing movement in the Republican- controlled Congress to rein in one of the nation’s most powerful environmental laws.
“It’s time to move forward, update this law and bring it into the 21st century,” said Pombo, R-Calif., a longtime critic of the act.
The proposed overhaul alarms environmental groups, who say that without the legal protections Republicans want to water down, wolves and grizzlies might be headed for extinction rather than roaming the Rockies.
“Pombo’s bill would reverse 30 years of progress,” said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “It would rip the heart out of America’s most important wildlife law.”
Angler Austin Condon says he appreciates the plight of landowners stuck with the burden of helping to preserve species, but he’s also thankful for the Endangered Species Act. Because of it, he can pluck greenback cutthroat trout from streams near his home in Estes Park like the original western settlers. Condon, though, tosses them back, as the law requires.
“These fish have occupied this mountain for the last 10,000 years,” said Condon. “Who are we to come along in 100 years and cause their extinction?”
The greenback cutthroat is a species on the brink of recovery, says Steve Moyer of Trout Unlimited. But under the bill speeding though the House, Moyer says it probably would be less likely to get there.
“If Mr. Pombo’s bill became law, it would bring implementation of the law to a halt,” he said. “There are so many roadblocks that the Fish and Wildlife Service would have to go through.”
Some of the fiercest battles over endangered species have been in the West. The listing of the northern spotted owl as endangered led to vastly curtailed logging in the Pacific Northwest.
In Colorado, the listing of the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse has dogged development in its habitat along the Front Range. The endangered status of fish such as the humpback chub has threatened restrictions on water usage on the Colorado River for years.
Gov. Bill Owens has gotten involved, pitching the idea of breeding endangered species, allowing species to revive without restricting land use.
Nearly everyone involved in the debate agrees that protecting species is a good idea. But they part company over regulating landowners.
Critics of the existing law say landowners shouldn’t bear society’s burden of protecting species. They say the law’s restrictions on land use, barring landowners from harming a listed species or getting a federal permit if it would damage a species’ habitat, are often severe enough that they amount to condemnation.
Rather than deal with the regulations, some landowners would rather break the law and kill a species before anyone knows it’s there, a practice Pombo called “shoot, shovel and shut up.”
That, says Pombo, is why there aren’t more success stories like the bald eagle. In fact, only 16 species have been brought back to recovery since the law was passed in 1973.
“Now we all know it takes time to recover endangered species, but after three decades of implementation, do these sound like the statistics of a successful law?” Pombo said. “Of course not.”
But environmentalists warn that loosening restrictions on habitat would doom recovery efforts. If the restrictions depend on paying landowners, hostile lawmakers could gut them by not allocating money.
“The best way to protect species is to conserve their habitat,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark of Defenders of Wildlife. Clark ran the Fish and Wildlife Service under President Clinton.
Environmentalists say that looking only at the small number of recovered species is the wrong measure. They point out that only nine of the more than 1,200 listed species have gone extinct.
The fast dash of Pombo’s bill through the House has earned attention, but the proposal faces a tougher time in the Senate, where Democrats have more power to derail legislation.
Staff writer Mike Soraghan can be reached at 202-662-8730 or msoraghan@denverpost.com.
