Petition denied on taking suckers off endangered species list [Klamath]

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) -- The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has denied petitions to end Endangered Species Act protection for two sucker fish that triggered irrigation shutoffs in the Klamath Basin last summer.

Officials said Tuesday that protection is still warranted for Lost River and shortnosed suckers, and the petitions to remove them from listing contained "no substantial information" that had not been considered in an earlier review.

The initial petition was filed by Interactive Citizens United, a private property rights group, and Richard Gierak, a member of the group's board of directors from Yreka, Calif.

"All the scientific data says they are wrong" to continue protecting the fish, he said. "It's more a political decision than a scientific one."

Petitions from the California State Grange, the Greenhorn Grange of Yreka, Calif., and Portland water rights attorney James Buchal were considered jointly and also denied.

Geirak's petition, submitted last September, argued that higher estimates of sucker populations obtained since the fish were listed as endangered in 1988 indicated the listing was wrong or that there had been substantial increases in the population.

The petition also maintained that sucker populations in Upper Klamath Lake have increased significantly in recent years, and populations of both fish in Clear Lake Reservoir and Gerber Reservoir are more abundant than earlier reported.

Fish and Wildlife reviewed the status of the fish last year, and found that the suckers still face substantial threats including habitat loss and poor water quality in Upper Klamath Lake. Fish had been sucked into irrigation canals, causing catastrophic kills.

During last year's drought, the federal government was forced to cut back irrigation to farmers on the Klamath Reclamation Project to conserve water for the suckers and threatened coho salmon in the Klamath River.

The shutoffs generated tense confrontations between farmers and the federal government, and millions of dollars in damages to crops.

Fish and Wildlife and Reclamation officials are reviewing the impacts on suckers of a 10-year operations plan for the irrigation project.

I think that there is a way to get the fish delisted and get the USFWS running to do it. Let them list the fish. The question really is:

Who should get the contract for suckerfish management: USFWS, or the landowners and their agents?

If the USFWS has virtually never assisted species recovery to the point of delisting,
If their power and budget increase only so long as the species is in trouble,
If their motives are to induce continued problems,
If the record of the agency is one of fraudulent claims, sloppy technical work, and behavior that is in its interest as a burgeoning bureaucracy as ADVERSE to its justifying purpose,
If their governing legal architecture is incapable of addressing competing species,
If the agency has caused MASSIVE problems for other species in the Wildlife sanctuary because of the water cutoff,
If the USFWS has every motive to waste ever more funds failing to achieve their Court mandate,
If the AAAS confirms that the actions were destructive to both suckers and salmon,
If that bureaucracy therefore exists at ADVERSE INTENT to the purpose and intent of the treaties that authorize and empower the ESA itself,
If that bureaucracy therefore exists at purposes ADVERSE to the citizens of the United States
And if the record of the last 30 years confirms all of that,

Then...

If the landowners have every reason to support increase the numbers of fish to get them out of trouble,
If by virtue of market competition the landowners have every reason to accomplish their goals at minimum cost,
If they have insured, third party verification of validated processes by which they manage the water quality of their runoff,
If the farmers have retained experts for the expressed purpose of research into improving the conditions in the lake among ALL the competing ecological interests,
And if the system I propose is intrinsically capable of accomplishing the STATED purpose of the ESA and more exactly meets the economic criteria not to waste wealth unnecessarily as demanded by NEPA,

Then why shouldn't the farmers sue to get the management contract (i.e. budget money) to manage the problem instead of USFWS and instead of trying to delist the fish? As far as I know, the Endangered Species Act doesn't say that the agency should do the work of managing species recovery, merely that they should assure that it happens.

That's just off the top of my head. How to get standing? The book covers that too.

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