CA125, NJ92, FOOTHILL-S, MD-ICC:New Pikes Spiked

Kent Olsen, head of Calif Transp Ventures (CTV) which holds the concession for the CA125-South toll road east of San Diego has a picture on his office wall of a Quino Checkerspot (QCS) butterfly. He says its not as spectacular as a Monach but it’s about the same size and still “very pretty”. He’s never seen one but a biologist hired by CTV for the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on CA125-S saw one on the right-of- way in 1997. Later in the year the QCS butterfly was listed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) as an “endangered species” in the US. The company’s biologist made a second sighting this year.

The company has to reach agreement with FWS on acceptable mitigation measures and once that agreement is reached file a Supplemental EIS before it can proceed with the road. Biologists think the QCS relies heavily on the flowers of a small perennial plant called the dot-seed plantain (Plantago Erecta) for sustenance, and CTV cannot disturb this butterfly ‘habitat’ without a proven mitigation method. Plantago Erecta grows in an area about 1/4mi by 1/2mi across the right-of-way down near the southern end of the planned road.

“It is very frustrating,” says Olsen, “This issue is driving the whole work schedule.”

No zealous green activists put the butterfly issue on the agenda, however.

“We discovered it. It got listed (as endangered), so we did the right thing. We reported it. We’re abiding by the letter of the law,” says Olsen. He looked at trying to reroute the road away from the butterfly habitat but found the area with the Plantago Erecta is just too large to avoid.

The company is ready to purchase extra land and cultivate the butterfly’s Plantago Erectas for it, but apparently very little is known about how the plant propagates and how much Plantago Erecta flower a butterfly needs, and what sized continuous field of Platago Erecta is needed to support a viable population of QCS butterflies. The endangered species listing is so new CTV is the first builder to be stopped by this species of butterfly, so it has to finance studies on the insect and its eating and mating habits, and test the cultivation of its favorite Platago Erecta flower food in order to be able to propose a scientifically documented and FWS-acceptable mitigation scheme.

If the company had not become entangled in the Endangered Species Act, Olsen says, they would be building by now. It has cost the venture 8 months to date and Olsen is pushing ahead hoping to reach agreement with FWS in time to do critical biological work during the spring “flight season” of the butterfly — a couple of months, March and April each year, when it forages and mates and its Platago Erectas do their flowering and seeding.

“If we can’t reach agreement (with FWS) on what we need to do in the next couple of months we risk losing this flight season and going into next year. Then we’ll be two years behind,” says Olsen. He doesn’t begrudge the cost of the research or of the habitat reserve they’ll buy the land for and tend. He says the cost is small relative to lost toll revenues and capitalized interest on their $20m already spent on the project. Worst of all is the sense that the process of deciding with the FWS what needs to be done for the butterfly could drag out indefinitely.

If this endangered species is like many others then in a year or two they’ll probably find the later-90s were rough climatic times for these butterflies in southern CA and that the population bounced back around the turn of the millenium. Or that noone really noticed the vast populations of such butterflies in somewhere like New Mexico, or for that matter just over the border in Baha California. This is TRnl talking, not Kent Olsen, who doesn’t criticize the law. He doesn’t criticize the officials he’s negotiating with either.

But we can. If the survival of the QCS butterfly species depends on whether or not CTV bulldozes one small patch of native plant, if that is the only patch of its habitat left on the face of the earth, then surely the species is virtually extinct anyway. Is the replacement habitat going to make any difference if the butterfly and its food supply have been reduced to such a tenuous existence already? A couple of butterflies on about 50 acres. One doesn’t want to be cavalier about accentuating species extinctions, but species have been going extinct on their own for eons, just as new species have been developing to fill their place and it seems to be playing God to think we have the power to save every stressed species on the face of the earth with laws and procedures of this kind.

Other Over-Reach

But it seems to be a time of quite unreasonable over-reaching by environmental regulators, some of them acting way beyond what was contemplated by legislators:

— in New Jersey the Turnpike has been given the runaround for two years now by the USEPA over its proposed NJ92 spur from exit-8A to US-1 near Princeton

— in southern Orange Co CA the Transp Corridors Agency has spent 18 months arguing fruitlessly with USEPA officials over the “Purpose and Need” statement for the missing leg of the Foothill South toll road

— in Montgomery Co MD the USEPA wrote demagogic and quite presumptuous comments about the Inter-County Connector toll road proposal and its implications for stream valleys through which it is designed to pass

The US Army Corps of Engineers which administers wetlands seems to be now staffed too by officers who think the cause of righteousness lies in blocking human use of swampland. Even though (perhaps because) the courts have recently suggested the Corps has gone beyond its legal authority to regulate soil fill it is filing drastic new regulations making construction over swampland and river valleys more difficult. As the road builders lobby ARTBA has pointed out some of the Corps’ proposals (limits on so-called nationwide permitting or NWPs) seem calculated more to delay than to protect. The Corps is flying blind, filing new rules before data has been gathered to estimate the impact of the new rules.

There’s a neat irony here. The regulators regulate so that humans wanting to develop have the burden of proof to show they will do no damage whatever to a single plant, animal or insect species deemed by bureacrats to be endangered, while the bureaucrats pursue new regulations without any obligation to collect any data about the impact of their proposed regulations on the human species. (Contact Jon Deason ARTBA 202 289 4434)