Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2006 | 7:15 a.m.
Contractors are continuing to carve out a golf course and lay out the roads for a massive housing development 55 miles north of Las Vegas, but a pair of environmental groups hope to throw an obstacle in the path of the desert bulldozers: a lawsuit filed in federal court Monday in Reno.
The suit is challenging powerful Nevada lobbyist Harvey Whittemore and his family, who have been working for seven years to win local, federal and state approval for the project of 160,000 homes and more than a dozen golf courses. The Seattle-based Western Lands Project and Reno resident Charles Watson of the Nevada Outdoor Recreation Association filed the lawsuit.
The crux of the suit is that a 15,000-acre juggling of federal and private land within the footprint of the 42,000-acre project was done outside federal law.
Christopher Krupp, Western Lands Project attorney, said Tuesday that the goal is to limit the project's effect: "We hope to reduce the impacts and size of this outsized development in the middle of the desert."
The project has long been the target of environmentalists, who have argued that Coyote Springs is representative of the worst in "leapfrog development" from the urban core. But Whittemore has had strong defenders, including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., whose son Leif Reid is a Whittemore lawyer.
Reid's 2004 Lincoln County bill moved a utility corridor that blocked construction on part of the land, while the Bureau of Land Management moved 15,000 acres set aside as habitat for the federally protected desert tortoise the same year. The set-aside was moved from the middle of the proposed development, a "doughnut hole" for wildlife, to the edge of the development.
The BLM justifies the move as helping consolidate tortoise habitat on the outskirts of the project. The move, along with an agreement to avoid development in an environmentally sensitive desert wash, helped the project win an Environmental Protection Agency stewardship award earlier this year.
But Krupp said the federal agency failed to follow the National Environmental Policy Act, which, in some situations, requires potentially lengthy environmental reviews before federal land actions.
"They haven't released any NEPA documentation to the public on that," Krupp said. "This was touted as a corrective boundary adjustment - this is more than 10,000 acres, not a technical boundary adjustment."
Scott Whittemore, Harvey's son and a principal in the project, says Congress allowed the moves when it authorized the original land swap in 1988 that privatized the land, which straddles the Clark-Lincoln county line. In that legislation, Congress gave the 28,000 acres in Nevada, plus the 15,000-acre set-aside for the desert tortoise, to a defense contractor in exchange for 5,000 acres in the Florida Everglades.
The original intent was to provide land for the building of rocket motors, but that never happened.
The contractor, Aerojet Corp., "was also authorized to use the land for any other lawful purpose approved by the secretary (of Interior), subject to reasonable requirements imposed by the secretary for protecting the desert tortoise and other species of fish, wildlife and plants," Scott Whittemore said Tuesday in a written release.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was consulted as part of the approval process, he said, and the federal law that created the original Aerojet swap does not allow the government to "unreasonably withhold authorization for a proposed use."
He said the goal of the lawsuit was to "confuse and delay" the project, which has already picked Pardee Homes as the master homebuilder and on which golf course construction, the drilling of water wells and other work has commenced.
"We do not anticipate any delays as a result of this lawsuit," he said.
Bob Williams, Nevada director for U.S. Fish and Wildlife, said the adjusted habitat was the result of extensive discussion.
Harvey Whittemore originally wanted to build in the area now set aside for wildlife habitat, Williams said, and the current configuration is much better for the habitat.
Michael Hillerby, executive vice president for Whittemore's company, Wingfield Nevada, said the legal challenge "just doesn't have any merit."
"The original 1988 act contemplated all of this," Hillerby said. "It carved out those leased lands at the time because they had concerns about the desert tortoise. When we alerted the federal agencies that we intended to develop that land, the Fish and Wildlife Service started their review."
The conclusion of the federal agencies was that the desert tortoise was better served by moving the habitat from the center of the development to the edge, connecting the 15,000 acres to the Mormon Mesa area, he said.
"That was one of the goals of the whole conservation plan," Hillerby said. "The process was followed exactly as it was outlined in the law."
The developer convened a committee of local, state and federal stakeholders that looked at the environmental impacts of the development and various design alternatives.
Jane Feldman, a Las Vegas activist with the local Sierra Club, was a member of the committee. BLM and Fish and Wildlife considered impacts to the desert tortoise, she said, and the land swap at the heart of the lawsuit was a product of those discussions.
"That change was a change for the better," she said.
Although the land swap is an improvement for the desert tortoise, Feldman said, she is not a fan of the development and she welcomes the suit.
The project is an example of the worst in sprawl development, extending homes and services miles away from the Las Vegas urban center, she said: "Anything that makes it go slower is going to be better In the course of laying out those arguments for the court, the entire project is going to be re-evaluated."
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