Group seeks status review on 198 California endangered species

SACRAMENTO - Nearly 300 rare creatures, from the Arroyo Southwestern toad to the White sedge, are considered threatened or in danger of extinction in California, yet there has been no recent review whether two-thirds of the plants and animals still merit protection.

Every five years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is required to consider the 298 species' status under the Endangered Species Act, but it says it's so tied up in competing lawsuits from environmental groups and opponents that most decisions now are driven by judges' orders.

To prod the service to act, a conservative legal group will notify it Friday that it will add a new lawsuit in 60 days unless the agency starts or schedules status reviews on all 198 listed species that have gone unchallenged for five years or more.

"The reason is to ensure that the act is really working," said Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Rob Rivett. The goal is supposed to be rescuing each species so that it no longer needs the special protections afforded by the 30-year-old law: "If you never review the species, you never know that. If they're trying to administer and enforce for species that don't need protection, that's a waste of money."

The suit would be the first of this scope, said Rivett, although environmental groups in Hawaii sued the service in the late 1990s to force critical habitat consideration for about 300 species there. California is second to Hawaii in the number of protected species.

In May, scientists including wildlife biologist Jane Goodall and environmental groups petitioned the Bush administration to list 225 plants and animals nationwide under the act.

Groups including the foundation have previously sued to force status reviews for individual species. The service must decide every five years if each species deserves to remain on the list, and if its status should be raised to endangered, lowered to threatened, or vice versa.

"The act is very, very clear" on what is required, Rivett said. "They're going to have to reach a formal agreement with us or we'll file a lawsuit."

Of the roughly 1,200 species listed nationally, none has ever been removed as a result of a status review - including recent reviews forced by the foundation of the Northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet, said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity. He predicted no species would be removed if the service reviews all 198 California species as well.

"What the Pacific Legal Foundation is doing is exploiting a loophole in the law to force the Fish and Wildlife Service to waste what limited resources it has (on) essentially useless studies," Suckling said.

A copy of the foundation's formal 60-day filing was provided to The Associated Press as it was sent by overnight courier to the service for delivery Friday.

A similar sequence is planned for early next year in Texas, where the service has failed to conduct reviews for about 50 species, Rivett said.

Alex Pitts, the service's regional spokeswoman, said the wildlife agency has spent its limited money on saving species instead of counting them. Another expensive lawsuit won't help, she said.

"We get limited resources," she said. "We try to put as much of that on the ground, to recovery activities, as possible ... to actually see gains for those species."

While the service hasn't conducted formal status reviews in many cases, she said, "we keep track of how they are doing" and make decisions appropriately.

Environmental groups criticized the foundation's move.

"It would be nice if Pacific Legal Foundation supported enough funding ... so they can do what they're required to do," said Bill Allayaud, the Sierra Club's state legislative director.

By concentrating on listing species without determining if the species has been helped, "they're only doing half the job," countered California Cattlemen's Association President Mark Nelson. "The success rate (of the Endangered Species Act) is not very good and I think it's time we take another look at it."

Nelson cited his own frustration with restrictions on how he can use property near Sacramento that was deemed potential habitat for the protected giant garter snakes when "the closest sighting was, like, 11 miles away."

The foundation is representing the Cattlemen's Association, the California State Grange, and the California Forestry Association in filing the notice.

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