Bull trout decision challenged

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – Environmentalists are challenging the Bush administration’s decision to cut habitat protection for the bull trout by 90 percent.

They claim the administration’s decision relied on uncertain local protections, ignored economic benefits of restoring fish, and did not consider the best science.

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Friends of the Wild Swan, two Montana environmental groups that have been battling the federal government over protection of the bull trout since 1992, filed the lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Portland.

Once a 60-day waiting period runs out next month, the lawsuit will be amended to allege that the critical habitat decision represents a pattern and practice of unlawful behavior repeated on other species, including salmon, said attorney Jack Tuholske from Missoula.

Tuholske said plaintiffs will present evidence that an original proposal from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists to protect nearly 20,000 miles of rivers and 500,000 acres of lakes for bull trout was cut by 90 percent by the office of the Interior secretary for political reasons.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction to compel Fish and Wildlife to designate adequate habitat for bull trout, allowing the bull trout to be removed from threatened and endangered species lists.

This is the latest development in a continuing fight between environmental groups and the Bush administration over enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, particularly the provision that calls for earmarking habitat critical to getting a species off the threatened or endangered species lists.

Meanwhile, at the request of Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, Fish and Wildlife is reviewing whether bull trout merit further protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Fish and Wildlife spokesman Phil Carroll said he could not comment on pending litigation, but the agency feels that its limited budgets are better spent on getting more declining species on the threatened and endangered lists than on designating critical habitat for species already protected.

Bull trout are not a true trout, but a char. They are found around the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies regions in clear cold mountain streams and lakes. Biologists say they have declined dramatically over the past 100 years due to logging, roadbuilding, dams, mining, grazing and urban development.

The plaintiffs have fought Fish and Wildlife since petitioning to have bull trout listed as an endangered species in 1992. Court orders led to threatened and endangered listings for populations in the Columbia and Klamath basins, respectively, in 1998, and threatened species listings for bull trout in the Jarbidge River in Nevada, coastal Puget Sound in Washington and the St. Mary and Belly rivers in Montana in 1999.

Areas cut from the critical habitat protections adopted this year include places the administration said were already protected, such as national forests covered by the Northwest Forest Plan and lands covered by the Montana Bull Trout Restoration Plan.

The lawsuit argues that those protections are inferior to a critical habitat designation. The Montana protections, for example, are not expected to be in place until 2007.