All anyone need do to evoke groans of resentment from many county officials in the West is say two words — “Spotted Owl.” Arguably, more ink, air time and political capital were expended in the fight for or against listing the critter as “endangered” than ever before or since.

Counties find themselves at the receiving end of a big stick when species get listed as “endangered” or “threatened.” Some choose to fight the designation. Others decide to take control of the process to bring their environment and the species’ habitat back to specs.

In the meantime, the federal government has developed several methods, basically landowner incentives, that counties can use to prevent – or at least postpone for a long time – a dreaded listing. The WIR workshop, Counties and the Endangered Species Act, focused on ways counties can use to protect or preserve species via private landowner incentives. The workshop also featured two county responses to listing of endangered species in their area.

King County, Wash.
Greg Kipp, director, Department of Development and Environmental Services, King County, Wash., detailed his county’s experience in coping with the listing of the Chinook salmon as an endangered species. King is a highly urbanized county with 39 municipalities, including Seattle and Bellevue, and an urban growth boundary, which allows 4–48 units per acre inside the boundary and one unit per five acres outside the boundary.

There was lots of debate early on about challenging the listing, but ultimately the county decided not to fight, Kipp said. Instead, the county decided to approach the listing with three ideas in mind: a commitment to recovery for the salmon, a wish to avoid the economic chaos that attended the spotted owl listing, and a recognition that the effort needed to be multijurisdictional, involving both rural and urban communities.

“The key element of our response was the recognition of our efforts to protect the environment. Our key principle was to base our recovery efforts on science.” he explained.

In the short term, the county stepped up its educational efforts and regulatory enforcement. It adopted “best practices” in its highway maintenance for herbicide and pesticide application, and it aggressively monitored the salmon’s habitat.

Its long-term strategies included:

• more aggressive land acquisition that has seen $20 million in expenditures over the past 10 years
• focus on the greatest opportunity for success
• establishment of larger buffer zones
• removal of barriers to salmon migration, such as culverts, and
• equitable spread of burden between urban and rural communities.

Kipp attributes the county’s success in controlling the upheaval created by the listing of an endangered species to its regional approach, its commitment to recovery and a strong political and civic leadership.

Clark County, Nev.
The desert tortoise can still be found throughout the Mojave, Colorado and Sonora deserts in California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona, but just barely. Over the past 20 years, the species has declined precipitously, as much as 90 percent in the western end of the Mojave. In 1989, the tortoise was listed as “threatened” over loud cries of protest from the City of Las Vegas.

Clark County, home to Las Vegas and one of the fastest growing counties in the country, decided protection, not protest, was the best course. It embarked on a “proactive” conservation planning effort that eventually came to embrace not only the threatened tortoise but also dozens of other at-risk plant and animal species, according to Richard B. Holmes, assistant county manager. Including species other than the tortoise in their planning came in response to the experience of Riverside County, Calif. In the mid-’90s, after a very painful process, Riverside set plans in motion to protect the kangaroo rat, only to have the federal government list another animal, this time a bird, six months later. “It put them back to Square 1. After that, we decided to engage in multiple-species protection planning,” Holmes said.

The new plan, adopted in September of last year, covers 78 plants and animals. (You can view them via the Internet at www.brrc.unr.edu/implement/species_images.html.) There is also a hefty war chest of $41 million accumulated over the past 10 years from mitigation fees of $550 per acre. Phase 1 of the Multiple-Species Habitat Conservation Plan commits $10 million to conservation efforts.

For the original tortoise protection plan and the broader multiple species plan, the county held public hearings and brought as many stakeholders to the planning table as possible. It was so successful in its collaborative process that a foundation ranked the county as number one in consensus-based habitat conservation planning. “We decided to be owners of the process,” Holmes explained, and so set out to foster “a completely open collaborative process.”

Clark County is high on multiple-species conservation planning. Holmes said it avoids political stand-offs, provides insurance against future species listings, allows for better environmental planning across a longer time frame and provokes consensus.

Federal tools
Cary Frazek, assistant director, Endangered Species, Washington State Fish and Wildlife Service, presented an overview of the tools for protecting species that include Safe Harbor Agreements for Private Property Owners, Habitat Conservation Plans, and Candidate Species and Candidate Conservation Agreements. To learn more, go to http://endangered.fws.gov/landowner/inde.htm for complete descriptions.

(To learn more about the King County, Wash. or Clark County, Nev. plans, you may contact Greg Kipp from King County at (206) 296-6701 and Richard Holmes from Clark County at rbh@co.clark.nv.us.)