Whipsnake habitat protection cut in half

Matt Carter, STAFF WRITER

Federal wildlife regulators made public this week a plan to designate 203,342 acres as "critical habitat" for the recovery of the Alameda whipsnake, a threatened species found only in the East Bay.

That is about half the size of the area designated five years ago by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in a ruling that was overturned in a court challenge by housing developers.

The service has chopped off more than 30,000 acres in the East Bay hills -- mostly in the canyons east of San Leandro and Castro Valley -- and removed the Niles Canyon-Sunol corridor and portions of eastern Contra Costa County.

The original plan designated 406,598 acres of critical habitat in four counties, but it was thrown out by a federal judge in 2003 after the Home Builders Association of Northern California filed a lawsuit claiming the economic impacts would be too great.

The Center for Biological Diversity -- which sued the service in 1999 to force the agency to designate critical habitat for the whipsnake and other protected species -- condemned the new plan, saying it will leave the snake more vulnerable to extinction.

On the other hand, housing developers who successfully challenged the service's original designation said the reductions, while a step in the right direction, do not go far enough.

"The fact that it is half as much is something to be cheered," said Joseph Perkins, president of the Home Builders Association of Northern California. "But they're still talking about more than 200,000 acres, and I feel it's excessive."

The new plan would designate 203,342 acres in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Santa Clara counties as critical habitat for the whipsnake, and some of those areas remain mostly unchanged.

In one of the snake's population centers, located in the hills between the cities of Hayward and Pleasanton, the Fish and Wildlife Service cut off only about 1,000 acres from a habitat area made up of about

30,000 acres.

But the service removed more than 30,000 acres from a much larger unit that stretches from Interstate 580 in Castro Valley northward toward Oakland and Lafayette.

Jeff Miller, a spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the economic impacts of critical habitat designations often are exaggerated.

"The Bush administration has consistently cooked the books on their economic analyses of critical habitat, claiming wildly inflated costs for habitat protection, while at the same time ignoring the clear benefits to society from conservation," Miller said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service maintains that designating critical habitat does not create wildlife preserves and actually has few impacts on landowners.

"In the real world, critical habitat doesn't really do that much for the species on the ground," said James Nickles, a spokesman for the service in Sacramento. "There are other things we can do, like working with landowners on voluntary programs to preserve habitat."

Nickles added that most of the changes stem from a better understanding of where the snakes can live. The Niles area was taken out, he said, because the land is not particularly habitable to the snakes.

"I think what's changed is we've done more accurate mapping," Nickles said.

Miller said a critical habitat designation can make it more difficult for a developer to build on land when a federal permit is required, such as when wetlands will be filled. Highway projects also can be affected by a critical habitat designation if the project depends on federal money.

U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, wants to eliminate critical habitat designations as part of a package of proposed amendments to the Endangered Species Act.

To date, the Fish and Wildlife Service has designated critical habitat for about one-third of the 1,268 species protected under the act.

But the service now maintains that the battles fought over those and other pending critical habitat designations are doing more harm than good, since they divert staff time and resources away from other work -- including identifying and protecting other threatened species.

Perkins said his Home Builders Association is among the groups supporting Pombo's amendments, which already have passed the House of Representatives.

Perkins said anti-growth forces use "species like the Alameda whipsnake as tools to further their ends."

"That is what is most objectionable about this entire process," he said. "We are fully supportive of measures to protect species like the whipsnake, tiger salamander and fairy shrimp."

Staff writer Matt O'Brien contributed to this report.

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