Thursday, June 8, 2006 | 7:31 a.m.
Houses sprout in the desert like toadstools in the dark. Desert tortoises, burrowing owls, rare animals and plants are pushed aside for development. An agreement between federal and local governments is supposed to mitigate what would otherwise be a grim calculus for desert wildlife.
The agreement, the Multi-Species Habitat Conservation Plan, has been successful in balancing conservation and development, those involved on all sides agree. But the program is not funding work this spring and summer, a situation that has conservationists and researchers up in arms.
Clark County administrators say their Desert Conservation Program should produce work on the ground later this year. Critics say that will be too late.
The county administrators - backed by County Manager Thom Reilly and Deputy County Manager Virginia Valentine - say they are being unfairly tarred for delays caused by federal agencies and by the time-consuming nature of the conservation work .
Looking at the program for developing, reviewing, approving and executing the 58 contracts that the county is now writing, however, is to gaze into a bureaucratic abyss.
The $30 million in contracts include such tasks as researching the number and range of kit foxes, peregrine falcons and the once-thought-extinct relict leopard frog, and researching diseases and other issues affecting the threatened desert tortoise.
A multiagency task
The agencies, entities and individuals who have had a role in approving, reviewing and executing the contracts include: multiple Clark County agencies, the now-dissolved advisory Implementation and Monitoring Committee, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Park Service, an interagency science committee dubbed the Adaptive Management Science Team, the Interior secretary and the Clark County district attorney's office.
The process of approving the projects and writing the contracts includes extensive discussions among them all. County officials say they could not go forward with writing contracts until the federal officials signed off.
Deputy District Attorney Catherine Jorgenson says the contracts could not be written or executed until the county had the money - that is, until the end of March, at the earliest. Even then, the county has to ensure the contracts make it through the wicket of state law, which requires competitive bidding unless the task is a professional contract for a specific area of expertise, she says.
Christine Robinson, director of Clark County Air Quality and Environmental Management and department-level boss of the habitat conservation program, says it is further complicated "because there are so many variables."
Procedural changes
Federal agencies compounded problems this spring with a proposal to radically change the structure of the program to eliminate much of the county's presence, she says.
Although officials with both the BLM and Fish and Wildlife Service, the two federal agencies central to the process, have chided the county for not moving faster on the contracts, Robinson provided an e-mail from the Fish and Wildlife state supervisor, Bob Williams, that suggests another scenario.
On April 21, a month after the BLM's release of the $30 million, Williams told the county's habitat program administrator, Marci Henson, that the county and federal agencies needed to meet "to more quickly fund" the 58 projects. But in the same e-mail, Williams said: "Moving forward before we have this meeting is premature."
Robinson says that was a fundamental change in the way projects were approved and supervised. The proposal - switching much of the supervision away from the county and to the federal agencies - was shelved at the end of May, she says.
Williams and Juan Palma, BLM Las Vegas field manager, confirm they have proposed a different oversight structure for the projects on federal land - which are most of them - but the intention was never to slow the process.
"There were some conversations at the federal level - Park Service, Forest Service, BLM, Fish and Wildlife - on how to speed up these projects," Palma says. "From our perspective, we have to get these things going faster."
The county always would play a role in deciding which projects would receive funding, he says, but "we've got projects and we've got to get them done."
The federal officials, Robinson and other county employees say, threw the program into disarray through the later-than-normal approval of the projects by Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Normally the county would expect approval in October. It came instead with a verbal acknowledgment from Norton in February, followed by a written authorization to access the $30 million from the Las Vegas BLM office at the end of March.
"Normally we would have the whole winter to work on this," Robinson says. "I don't see how we're doing anything wrong or out of the ordinary."
The process was additionally complicated by the fact that, among other items, five of the seven Fish and Wildlife projects given priority status had significant technical issues that needed to be resolved, which wasn't discovered until late March.
Palma acknowledges the federal side of the process could have been handled differently, and getting earlier approval for the projects from the Interior Department would have speeded things up .
"It's also a fact that once the secretary (of Interior) signs that package, people do what they need to do," he says. The county "could have begun all these procedures as soon as the secretary signed the authorization (in February) and then for sure by the end of March" when the BLM formally notified the county of the $30 million allocation from federal land sales.
Palma says at this point, why critical research work targeting the spring and early summer will not happen this year is a question for the county.
"Those are their own procedures," he says.
Robinson says county employees are working hard to write the contracts: "We're doing these things. The only thing that's different is the timing of the approval of the feds.
"I don't know how we could have done anything different."
Nevada conservationist John Hiatt, whose wife, Hermi, serves on the county's habitat conservation advisory committee, says that the county could have, and should have, moved faster to get the conservation work done:
"If the conservation actions are not taken in an expeditious manner, one can certainly question the commitment of the county to pursue their permit obligations.
"When you have one of the most rapidly growing counties in the country in terms of population growth, and the major threat to the species of concern is that growth, time is the enemy, and there is reason to move expeditiously. If you don't move in an expeditious way, it is the same as not doing it."
Robinson says the county is working as quickly as possible: "I agree with him."
Because of the delay and key spring and early summer growing seasons for species, some scientists who would receive funding through the county projects have had to push back their projects until next year. Other programs that have been going on for years will have gaps in the data.
Ron Marlow, a UNR biologist who specializes in the desert tortoise, the focus of the Habitat Conservation program, is pointed in his criticism:
"Either the program's worth doing or we shouldn't do it. Clark County has a permit, which is a contractual obligation to do certain things in exchange for which they are allowed to take turtle habitat."
Beyond plants, animals
The issue is bigger than the county government, or federal bureaucracy. It affects even those who have no interest in protecting rare plants and animals, he said. The same permit that created the federal-local partnership and the Habitat Conservation program also allows continued housing and commercial development to accommodate the county's steadily growing population.
"Clark County has a contractual obligation to do certain things in exchange for which they are allowed to take tortoise habitat," Marlow says. "A big part of our economy is dependent on this."
Marlow has research grants awaiting Clark County's approval, and attended advisory committee meetings that debated the various projects to be funded. County officials say Marlow therefore has a very big dog in the fight over the timing of the project contracts.
Robinson says many county critics have been deeply involved in a process that in the past has included conflicts of interest and problems with data delivery in key projects. Those critics know the county isn't responsible for the current situation, she says.
"I think they know better. Shame on them It is insincere for them to blame the county for that," Robinson says. "They know we could not have done what they're asking us to do. The delay has caused challenges for all of us, but the delay has not been on our part."
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