Agency says lawsuits are preventing additions to endangered species list

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it is so busy responding to lawsuits filed by environmental groups that it does not have enough money to add any more wildlife to the endangered species list for nearly a year.

The decision means that about 25 species being considered for the endangered list will have to wait past the end of this fiscal year, which ends next Sept. 30, agency spokesman Hugh Vickery said. The agency will make exceptions for species in imminent danger of becoming extinct.

The Fish and Wildlife service is swamped by lawsuits from environmental groups asking the agency to designate ''critical habitat'' for some of the 1,225 species in the United States already listed as threatened or endangered. A critical habitat ruling describes the area where a species either lives or could live.

''We just don't have the staff or the funding necessary to do anything that isn't ordered by a court,'' Vickery said Tuesday. He said the agency expects to decide on 57 critical habitat areas for about 300 species this year.

Environmentalists are crying foul.

''Fish and Wildlife is playing serious politics, and the loser is America's endangered wildlife,'' said David Hogan of the Center for Biological Diversity. The Tucson, Ariz.-based group has filed several lawsuits to force the service to designate critical habitat.

Congress approved nearly $6.4 million for the agency's endangered species work during fiscal 2001, up from about $6.2 million last year but less than the $7.2 million President Clinton requested. The agency had expected to add about 30 species to the endangered list this year.

The federal Endangered Species Act gives the Fish and Wildlife Service the responsibility of determining which creatures should be protected and telling other agencies what they may not do to damage the listed species.

An endangered or threatened listing means that federal agencies may not take any action or approve permits for any projects that harm that species.

For example, federal authorities could not approve the construction of a dam that would harm an endangered fish.

In critical habitat areas, those restrictions on federal agencies also extend to areas where the listed species do not live but are needed for their recovery. Thus a federal agency could not approve the construction of a dam in a critical habitat area for an endangered fish if the dam would destroy that habitat, even if the fish was not actually present there.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has labeled critical habitat for 133 endangered or threatened species, about 10 percent of the total.

The agency would rather focus on putting species on the endangered list rather than designating critical habitat, Vickery said. Habitat rulings are expensive and time-consuming and do not offer much more protection to species than they get from being on the list in the first place, Vickery said.

The species that will have to wait for possible endangered listings include the Aleutian sea otter, Mississippi gopher frog and the coastal cutthroat trout, Vickery said.

''We at the Fish and Wildlife Service are frustrated, because we believe that right now we are not able to do the things that are most effective to preserve threatened and endangered species, and that is to get them on the endangered species list,'' Vickery said.

Environmentalists say critical habitat designations are vital to make sure that recovering species do not begin recovering, only to find they do not have a home. They say the law requires the habitat designations and that the agency should ask for enough money to both label habitat and add to the species list.

''We've only sued the agency over their failures to protect species on the brink of extinction,'' Hogan said.

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On the Net:

Fish and Wildlife Service endangered species program: http://endangered.fws.gov

Center for Biological Diversity: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org