Congressman Pombo makes a lot of sense in the ideas he is putting forth about changes that should be made around the Endangered Species Act, long a bane to property owners in the Valley.
An excerpt.
Pombo lays out case against species act
By David Whitney -- Bee Washington Bureau Published 12:01 am PDT Sunday, July 16, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Rep. Richard Pombo, the Tracy Republican who heads the House Resources Committee, stirs conflict with almost every major initiative he launches, from offshore drilling to Indian gambling.
Few members of Congress have as much influence over the nation's environmental laws as Pombo. And no topic has been more contentious than his legislation to overhaul the Endangered Species Act.
The House approved Pombo's sweeping rewrite of the 1973 law on a 229-193 vote in September. It was widely denounced by environmentalists as a disturbing retreat from habitat protection and a paperwork nightmare for agencies seeking to revive the country's 1,268 threatened and endangered plants and animals, 186 of which are in California.
In the Senate, Pombo's bill was greeted even by Republicans with a measure of skepticism. The Bush administration, while supporting it, is worried about the cost of Pombo's plan to compensate landowners for restrictions on their property use.
In an interview, Pombo discussed why he thinks the act signed into law by President Nixon needs an overhaul and how his bill would work.
Q: What are your problems with the Endangered Species Act now?
A: I didn't like the way it treated private property owners. It was heavy-handed. It didn't really matter what the facts were on the ground or what the science was. It was decisions being driven by somebody in Washington who had never even been to the area being regulated.
I felt it was wrong for them to come in and tell someone who had been farming for a hundred years that you can no longer farm it any more because it was endangered species habitat.
But the more I got into it, I began to realize that the act didn't work. At some point, the agency began to focus on land-use control and forgot all about recovering species.
This was driven by lawsuits. (Environmentalists) would file a lawsuit on the designation of critical habitat, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would lose. As more of a defensive posture, they began focusing on designation of critical habitat and they forgot all about recovering species and whether or not the habitat that was being protected actually did anything.
