Sunday, Nov. 27, 2005 | 7:15 a.m.
Turf battles and pet projects have prevailed over endangered plants and animals in a Clark County program intended to protect wildlife from rampant development.
The county's Desert Conservation Program has been plagued with conflicts of interest, lack of accountability and unwillingness by some participants to share the results of research projects, an investigation by the Las Vegas Sun revealed.
The program is critical to developers, because without it they would have to apply for a federal permit each time they want to build a new subdivision, casino, retail center or office park.
If the program is shut down by its policing agency, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, it could slow the valley's growth to a trickle.
Meanwhile, rare plants and animals could die out because county officials have no idea how growth is impacting them.
In some cases, projects paid out of the program's purse -- more than $42 million to date -- were completed years after they were due, and only after repeated requests from the county.
Much of the work was either unnecessary or not performed well enough to be useful, critics said. Scientists have studied several species, but nothing connects the individual studies to a coordinated conservation effort.
Clark County, under the direction of a new program administrator, has been cracking down on contractors and tracking down lost information. Stricter requirements for selecting and carrying out projects have been put in place.
But lingering problems exist, such as concerns by federal agencies conducting many of the studies that sensitive data about the location of endangered species could be compromised if turned over to the county.
One former employee of the conservation program said county officials forced him to resign because he tried to pressure the agencies to hand over their data, and because he openly questioned why it was taking the county so long to whip the program into shape.
The Desert Conservation Program evolved from an effort to protect the struggling desert tortoise and became mandatory with the approval of the county's award-winning Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan in 2001. Projects funded by the program, which seeks to protect the tortoise and 78 other plants and animals, began in 1999.
Local, state and federal officials initially developed a tortoise conservation plan to avoid a moratorium on growth in the valley after the desert tortoise was added to the endangered species list in 1989.
Following a series of highly contentious meetings between federal agencies, developers and recreational users of the desert, the expanded, multiple species plan was created that required developers to pay $550 for each acre they develop to help fund conservation efforts.
In exchange, the conservation plan allows development to continue through the use of a special permit issued by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Without it, developers would have to undergo a potentially lengthy application process whenever they want to build.
But in recent weeks, both environmentalists and developers have voiced concerns that the plan may not be working.
Los Angeles-based environmental group Urban Wildlands filed a petition with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in October seeking emergency action to stop development affecting the Mount Charleston blue butterfly, which is supposed to be protected by the multiple species plan.
Urban Wildlands science director Travis Longcore said in October that the butterfly's continued habitat loss is evidence the plan has been ineffective.
"The things that are in place to prevent the extinction of this species are not working," Longcore said. "There is something fundamentally wrong."
County officials say it is too early to tell, but a series of setbacks and unresolved questions have made the already monumental conservation effort even more difficult.
During its first six years, the Desert Conservation Program has funded 194 projects, assigned to various government agencies and conservation groups.
While the studies cover a broad spectrum of plants and animals, some of the work either was completed years late or not at all, and in other cases the results were not provided to Clark County.
Conservation program administrator Marci Henson said some contracts, especially those awarded during the first two years, lacked specific criteria for how the research would be conducted and whether the contractor or Clark County would ultimately "own" the published results. A Web site constructed to share results with the public contains little or no information about many of the studies, especially those funded in the program's first two years. The site, created by University of Nevada Reno's Biological Resources Research Center, is at www.brrc.unr.edu/mshcp/.
There have been a variety of delays and other problems with projects funded by the county program:
County documents state UNLV was to produce a final report by December 2002, but Henson said the work was not finished until February 2004. She said a student working on the project either graduated or took another job.
No updates have been posted to the conservation program Web site, but Henson said the county received a printed report.
After checking county records, Henson said she learned that the report had been written, "although Clark County does not have a copy." Henson provided a reference to the published report, but it lists the publication date as 1997 -- two years before the study was funded.
The contract did not specify whether the observatory or the county would own the copyright, she said.
Henson, who began working for the county in 2002 and took over as program administrator a year ago, said the conservation plan's framers thought a loosely organized committee of scientists, environmentalists and government agents could effectively develop and assign projects to meet the plan's stated goals.
They were wrong, she said.
One major problem, Henson said, is that the group assigning the projects also represents the agencies and organizations contracted to perform the work.
She said the process used by the program's Implementation and Monitoring Committee is tainted with conflicts of interest and may have violated open meetings laws because decisions about how to spend public money were made by consensus without any formal votes.
Henson said it is possible the meetings were legal because the committee is not a public body, adding that she is in the process of researching the matter with the district attorney.
"We're trying to get away from even the appearance of impropriety," she said.
Rob Mrowka, Clark County's manager of environmental planning and one of Henson's bosses, said because many committee members represent federal agencies that own the wildlife habitat being studied, the county has been reluctant to question their decisions.
"They had an inordinate amount of authority that went unchallenged," Mrowka said.
The result was a veritable field day for the committee members, who awarded themselves millions of dollars for what Mrowka called "informed pet projects" -- studies that were in the realm of wildlife protection but not necessarily the ones needed.
Mrowka and Henson said they are working to prevent such problems in the future. They have launched an internal review of the Implementation and Monitoring Committee and will have all future project proposals scrutinized by third-party scientists not involved in the program.
The county has applied a new ethics policy to the committee, Henson said, and she may require committee members to attend ethics classes.
Another aspect of the multiple species plan that has failed to build steam is the "adaptive management process," which is supposed to gauge the effectiveness of existing conservation measures so changes can be made if necessary.
The original plan promises that "biological management techniques and specific objectives will be evaluated regularly in light of monitoring results and new information on species' needs, land use and a variety of other factors."
However, after six years the county has yet to make those evaluations for the purpose of adapting the program. Mrowka said it takes years to understand how the changing landscape affects wildlife, adding that the conservation plan's goals were "very unrealistic."
"We promised to do all sorts of things that, at the time, we didn't realize how huge a bureaucracy was involved," he said.
Inadequate staffing for the program's administration also has slowed progress, Mrowka said, but the Implementation and Monitoring Committee has been reluctant to approve new hires.
"They always wanted to keep the staffing bare bones," he said.
Ed Durbeck, a geographic information systems (GIS) programmer Clark County hired in May to create a database for the conservation program, said he believes the current leadership is working to address those problems. But he does not understand why it took six years.
"A lot of money has been wasted, and a lot of damage has been done to these species," said Durbeck, who resigned in September at the county's behest.
But Henson said rapid change is difficult because of the program's complexity and the number of agencies involved.
"You're working within a bureaucracy, so there are processes to reform processes," she said.
Durbeck said he arrived at Clark County headquarters in May excited about the prospect of working with complex geographic data and helping the environment. The pay was good, too, he said.
However, he soon found out there simply was no data -- at least none in the county's possession. Despite 194 projects undertaken during the program's first six years, Durbeck said not one shred of geographic data had been submitted.
So he set about the task of contacting the organizations and government agencies that had performed studies for the county. Durbeck said he could not believe the response he got.
"When I went to some of these agencies, they told me, 'We're not required to submit the data,' " he said. "They would say things like, 'In our contract, the GIS data is not specifically listed as a deliverable.' "
Even stranger, Durbeck said, was that the contractors clearly had never been asked to turn over the fruits of their county-funded labors. According to the conservation plan, a GIS database was supposed to have been created no later than 2003.
"They got money from us -- that was not a grant. They had a contract with us," he said. "It would be like if you bought a new set of tires and they refused to put them on your car."
Durbeck said his superiors at the county reprimanded him when they found out he had taken that attitude.
"I was too aggressive in insisting that people follow the rules of the plan," he said. "They said I wasn't being cooperative with these people."
Some agencies and organizations did grant Durbeck's request for information, and others agreed to give him partial data. Unfortunately, he said, much of it was useless.
"The data they generated was either not what's required by the plan or not good enough quality to be used for the plan," he said.
Beth Moore, spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service, which has done several projects for the conservation program, said the reason her agency has not provided raw GIS data to Clark County is that such information could be used by poachers to pinpoint the location of endangered plants and animals.
She said the Bureau of Land Management has been sued for revealing sensitive archaeological data to the public, and the Forest Service does not want to suffer the same fate.
"We don't have a problem sharing the information with the county, but we want to make sure we can keep it safe," Moore said.
Still, Durbeck said nowhere in the plan or any of the individual contracts does it say Clark County would not receive the data for studies it funds. He said the database he created would have kept sensitive information secure.
Mrowka said Durbeck was asked to leave because he was abrasive and had been making the federal employees angry.
"I think (he) was new to government," Mrowka said.
But Durbeck said he could not understand why he was the only one concerned about fulfilling all the promises made in the conservation plan.
No one else seemed bothered that the Implementation and Monitoring Committee essentially had been writing its own checks to spend taxpayer money as it pleased, he said.
"What is that?" Durbeck said. "Is that illegal? Is that unethical? Is that a violation of the public trust?"
Elise McAllister, of the nonprofit group Partners in Conservation, said she can understand why an outsider would find fault with the program thus far.
But McAllister, one of the Implementation and Monitoring Committee's 29 current members, said unclear guidelines and unanticipated growth have created challenges far greater than anyone expected.
First of all, the Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan contains 640 individual conservation actions, some of which are "incredibly vague," she said.
In addition, the program and its budget have ballooned to 10 times the size originally envisioned, making it less manageable and increasing the urgency to get more work done in less time.
The 30-year plan allows for the development of 145,000 acres, only 86,000 of which remain, county officials said.
"No one in their wildest dreams thought we would be going through the land this fast," McAllister said. "No matter what side of the aisle you're on, nobody could have predicted this."
Despite the program's expanded scope, the committee received no clear, overarching strategy or objectives to follow, she said. As a result, some meetings were conducted like brainstorming sessions where every workable idea received its own budget.
McAllister agrees with the county's decision to add structure to the committee's decision-making process, but she said some members are worried that bureaucrats are taking over what has been primarily a collaborative, scientific endeavor.
Still, she said the criticism that her committee has funded pet projects is valid, and that its loose structure has allowed for the repeated approval of studies that probably do not deserve it.
"Once something gets funded, it just keeps on living," McAllister said.
Overall, she said, the program to date has been neither a total disaster nor wildly successful.
"The answer is somewhere in the middle," McAllister said.
But even as officials seek to improve the program's implementation, Henson said residents should understand that the county has far exceeded the minimum spending for species protection, budgeting an additional $40 million for the upcoming biennium when only $3.8 million was required.
"You won't find another place in the country where this much money is being spent on conservation," Henson said.
J. Craig Anderson can be reached at 259-2320 or at [email protected].
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