Tortoises creep into the public debate

By Joe Schoenmann

Sunday, Oct. 11, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The county won’t be picking up your poor, your tired or your huddled masses of desert tortoises any longer.

After Dec. 31 residents who have kept the threatened species as pets but want to be done with them will be on their own.

The County Commission approved that change Tuesday after hearing a report on the expense — picking up about 1,000 unwanted tortoises costs $104,000 a year, plus $700,000 to take care of them once they’re in county hands — and an argument that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and/or the Nevada Wildlife Department should be doing the picking up.

County staff and U.S. Fish and Wildlife people will continue discussing how to deal with abandoned pets.

County officials hope those talks are amicable because a much more important, potentially more expensive matter largely related to desert tortoises is creeping up on the county. And the county does not want to anger Fish and Wildlife.

What could be more important than picking up those cute, abandoned animals?

As it turns out, a community advisory group is working on a new conservation plan to expand developable acreage in the Las Vegas Valley. U.S. Fish and Wildlife must sign off on the permit.

Under the current, 30-year conservation plan, which governs 140,000 acres and expires in 2031, developers pay $550 per acre to care for tortoises. Most of that money is spent on conserving more than a million acres of tortoise habitat outside the Las Vegas Valley.

More important, the current plan includes a permit allowing for the “incidental take,” or harm to tortoises and 77 other protected species. So if, for example, a developer’s construction crew happens to plow under some tortoises during the grading of land, that’s acceptable. It has been that way for almost 20 years.

Fish and Wildlife wants to change that standard.

What do they want to do, save every tortoise crawling the high desert?

As many as possible. Janet Bair, U.S. Fish and Wildlife regional supervisor, said her agency has worked out multispecies habitat conservation plan agreements with Lincoln County and with the developers of Coyote Springs, a community to be built on 42,000 acres 60 miles north of Las Vegas. It also hopes to work with Nye County. Those agreements include new language restricting the incidental taking of tortoises.

What’s wrong with that?

Some in Clark County see it as unnecessary and expensive. The new permit would expand the period of the agreement to 50 years and add 215,000 acres.

Terry Murphy, who sits on the community advisory board and brokered the desert tortoise compromise between developers, the county and feds 20 years ago, said the acreage being considered contains about 1 percent of all desert tortoise habitat.

“There are hundreds of thousands of them in existence,” said Murphy, who is also a well-known consultant to developers and casinos. “So to expend that much time saving urban tortoises and putting them God-knows-where, I’m not a scientist but I can’t see how that’s going to help them.”

She added that some members of the advisory group are talking about increasing the amount of money per acre that developers must pay for desert species conservation.

Does Fish and Wildlife agree that the tortoises are plentiful?

The entire tortoise habitat, stretching from Utah through Nevada to California, isn’t under constant study, but Bair said her agency has seen various populations of the tortoises scattered throughout the area “declining precipitously.”

“We’ve also noticed ... in the last six to seven years Southern Nevada has some of the lowest densities in the range.”

Does the federal agency think it could compromise on the “taking” of tortoises?

Bair smiled at the question, then said the agency wants to hear “all options.”

To that end, U.S. Fish and Wildlife is holding several hearings, called scoping meetings, to get the public’s advice on changes in the conservation plan. The agency will consider the information as it prepares an environmental-impact statement for the additional 215,000 acres.

The first of those meetings will be from 6 to 8 p.m. Oct. 19 at the Clark County Library, 1401 E. Flamingo Road.

County Quote of the Week

“This is almost like tree-hugger frustration. Can’t find no trees to protect in the desert so it’s tortoises.”

— Commissioner Tom Collins, during discussion about discontinuing the county’s role in picking up abandoned desert tortoises.