Liberty
Matters News Service
November 17, 2004
Ranchers Enticed by Conservation Easements
Like so many landowners nationwide, thirteen landowners,
who collectively own 25,000 acres along Nebraska's Niobrara River, are thinking
about selling their property rights for a mess of potage. Landowners need to
know by selling conservation easements to a land trust organization or
government agency they become, in essence, mere tenets on their own property.
The Niobrara Council, a quasi-governmental agency that oversees activities
connected with the Niobrara, is also the group promoting the easement offer.
The Council, like so many other land trusts, is eager to sign up the ranchers'
property and has applied for a $1 million grant from the Nebraska Environmental
Trust and a $500,000 grant from the Department of Interior to pursue the
projects. David Sands, a member of the Council and executive director of the
Nebraska Land Trust, said the group wants to identify the best land for
protection. "I don't know if there's such a thing as a bad easement in the
Niobrara Valley, but certainly with limited funding you want to be able to
select the very best," he said. Another land preservation organization, The
Nature Conservancy, already controls more than 56,000 acres in the Niobrara
Valley, including more than 40 miles of riverfront conservation easements.
Niobrara Council Short of Funds for
Preservation Deals
Conservation
Easements
PLF to Sue Federal Government
The Pacific Legal Foundation
(PLF) has filed notice that it intends to sue the U. S. Fish and Wildlife
Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service for failing to meet the
guidelines of the Endangered Species Act regarding the designation of critical
habitat for 48 species of California plants and animals. PLF charges the
government agencies did not properly study the areas in question to determine
if they were suitable habitat for the 48 species, nor did they adequately study
the economic effects upon the landowners and businesses. "The federal
government has been using a flawed template to designate critical habitat,"
said PLF attorney Reed Hopper. The government's strategy is to set aside as
much land as possible without doing the work to determine where the species
actually live and what they require to recover." Over 42 million acres of
California's 100 million acres are currently designated critical habitat for
something. "We're talking about millions of acres of property subjected to
strict federal regulation, which has dramatic repercussions for the state's
economy," Reed said. In May 2003 PLF won a landmark case, Home Builders
Association of Northern California v. United States Fish and Wildlife
Service, in which a federal judge invalidated the U. S. Fish and Wildlife
Service's arbitrary designation of 400,000 acres of critical habitat for the
Alameda whipsnake.
PLF Launches Sweeping Lawsuit Challenging
Critical Habitat for 48 Species in California
Whittling down the Endangered List
A little fish that could have impeded the
use of thousands of acres of land along the Arkansas and Canadian rivers has
disappeared altogether from those waters, says a spokesman for the U. S. Fish
and Wildlife Service (FWS) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The FWS re-thought its position
of designating thousands of acres of critical habitat for the fish along rivers
in Kansas, Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle after a U. S. District Judge ruled
in favor of landowners and Farm Credit Banks and other groups that filed suit
challenging the critical habitat designation. The FWS now believes the fish
only lives in small stretches of the Cimarron River in Kansas and the Canadian
in Oklahoma and Texas. The FWS must hold a series of three "open-house"
meetings across the area before it can officially remove the Arkansas River
from the critical habitat list. Meanwhile, environmentalists are crying in
their beer after the FWS decided there was not enough solid evidence to place
the white-tailed prairie dog on the endangered species list. The Center for
Native Ecosystems in 2002 petitioned the government to list the animal as
threatened claiming it was dying off due to the plague and the effects of oil
and gas exploration. Spokesman for the group, Jacob Smith, said; "We'll look
carefully at what they [the FWS] did and decide where to go from here,
especially when they act so blatantly and illegally and make a decision that
flies in the face of science." Sharon Rose, FWS spokesman, said the group
didn't provide specific data showing how the plague or development harmed the
animals.
Arkansas River Shiner No Longer in River
Prairie Dog Not Listed as Threatened
Fish and Wildlife "Beyond the Pale"
U.S. District Court Judge
Royce C. Lambreth chided the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for failing
to follow the rules when it designated 6,800 acres and 126 linear miles of the
Cape Hatteras National Seashore as critical habitat for wintering piping
plovers. "Tourism is the lifeblood of Dare County's economy, and we are
grateful that the Court took note of this," said Warren Judge, chairman of the
Dare County Board of Commissioners, a party to the lawsuit against the
Department of Interior and others. Judge Lambreth wrote that the FWS
arbitrarily designated critical habitat for the birds despite the fact some
areas were not suitable. "The Service's argued-for interpretation, essentially
that designation is proper merely if PCEs (areas containing features essential
to conservation of the species) will likely be found in the future, is simply
beyond the pale of the statute," the judge said. The opinion also cited the FWS
for failure to properly interpret the "best available science," and accurately
assess economic impact among other shortcomings.
Judge Sides with County