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Feds downsize tiger salamander protection area
A tiger salamander.
PD FilePublished: Friday, January 14, 2011 at 4:05 p.m.
Last Modified: Friday, January 14, 2011 at 4:05 p.m.
Federal authorities on Friday issued a downsized plan for the area they would oversee in the heart of Sonoma County to protect the endangered California tiger salamander.
While a previous draft plan covered a 74,000-acre expanse of the Santa Rosa Plain, the new habitat area would cover about 51,000 acres.
That acreage still represents a swath of land from Windsor to northern Petaluma and from Llano Road on the west to Petaluma Hill Road on the east.
But most of the area's 100-year flood zone and more of the urban land in the region are no longer a part of the plan, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials said.
Also removed were areas not seen as having essential habitat for the species, agency officials said.
A 30-day public comment period on the revised proposal begins Tuesday. A final rule still is expected by July 1.
Agency officials said the changes were based on the “best available science,” and not on political pressure from local governments or the building industry.
Both have been critical of the agency's previous efforts to designate critical habitat for the salamander, largely because the protections are seen as a formidable obstacle for development.
The last proposal, covering 74,223 acres, was blasted by County of Sonoma officials as overly broad and not tied to the actual distribution of the species, which are extremely rare and seldom seen. County officials called for a smaller habitat area of no more than 17,000 acres covering roughly the area from Guerneville to Pepper roads and from Llano Road to Highway 101.
The newly downsized habitat area takes in some of that input, said Pete Parkinson, head of the county's Permit and Resource Management Department.
Areas near Pepper Road and others in the flood plain or around the cities were removed, he said.
But a large portion of the county north of Santa Rosa Creek remains in the habitat plan, even though no tiger salamanders have been spotted there, Parkinson said.
“We'll need to take a look at this and reiterate any comments that we feel they haven't addressed,” he said.
Keith Woods, chief executive of the North Coast Builders Exchange, called the revision “welcome news.”
“For some of us it may not go far enough, but it's better than what they were proposing.”
Local environmentalists who've supported efforts to protect the salamander said they'd needed more time to evaluate the proposal and the acreage removed in the revision.
“I want to see what they chopped off,” said Keith Kallum, a representative of the Sierra Club's Redwood Chapter.
The California tiger salamander was designated an endangered species by the federal government in Sonoma County in 2002. Since then, builders and others seeking greater flexibility for construction projects and environmentalists battling for wider protection for the species have been involved in a tug-of-war over the habitat issue.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has been left to find a middle ground.
The agency's first proposal, in 2005, called for the larger 74,223-acre area, but it was scuttled, some say by political pressure under the Bush administration. The agency's ultimate recommendation, calling for no critical habitat, prompted a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based environmental group with offices around the country, including San Francisco.
Settlement terms in the suit led to a return of the 2005 plan, which the agency re-issued in 2009, again to criticism from local government and building industry officials. Under that plan, critics pointed out, the 20-year economic cost of saving the species amounted to $336 million, according to the agency's own 2005 estimate.
A local salamander conservation effort was estimated to cost even more, about $400 million.
That voluntary effort involving local government representatives, development and environmental interests, called the Santa Rosa Plain Conservation Strategy, has been in limbo during the back-and-forth over the federal plans.
Critics say the effort is weighed down by decades of lax land-use oversight by local governments and would prove, according to one Center for Biological Diversity representative, “a road map for extinction of the salamander.”
The group, whose experts on the issue were not available Friday, has pushed instead for an expanded federal habitat designation that would more strictly limit impacts on the salamander's preferred vernal pool habitat.
The latest version of that plan, designating 50,855 acres of habitat, would have a vastly smaller 25-year economic cost of between $465,000 and $685,000, federal government documents released Friday show.
Woods, the building industry official, called that figure low.
“It's the cost of one single-family home,” he said, adding that he doubted it could reflect the impact of tighter building oversight on everything from park maintenance to school construction that he said would result from the habitat protections.
Fish and Wildlife officials said only projects applying for a federal permit to alter salamander habitat would be affected.
Still, Woods said, “it removes the flexibility of a community growing in a way that it needs to grow.”
The plan can be viewed at www.fws.gov/sacramento.
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