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Construction—The Building Industry Association tries to get the gnatcatcher delisted

As the property value of 180,000 acres of vacant county land from the coast to the mountains hangs in the balance, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is reviewing new evidence the Coastal California gnatcatcher is not an endangered species, a building industry official said last week.

The Building Industry Association of San Diego County asked U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt late last month to delay designating the land as endangered species habitat. The Interior Department agreed to do so after a trio of researchers published a paper in the October Journal of Conservation Biology citing new evidence the bird is not a unique subspecies, but is identical in genetic makeup to millions of gnatcatchers in Mexico.

One of the researchers, Jonathon Atwood, was the author of an earlier study the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service used to list the bird as an endangered species in 1993.

At stake is development of about 800,000 acres in five Southern California counties, said Matthew Adams, director of government affairs for BIA San Diego.

If the designation goes into effect, owners of land designated as gnatcatcher habitat would have to meet with Fish & Wildlife Service officials to see how much of their land would need to be excluded from development.

That could mean an additional delay in development of 18 to 24 months and a loss in the amount of usable land, he said.

“This whole designation was created for a species that doesn’t exist,” Adams said. “It’s not a subspecies, it’s the same bird that exists in the millions in Mexico.”

Jane Hendron, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service office in Carlsbad, said Oct. 12 that while the new scientific paper was being reviewed by her department, the agency was still facing a court-ordered deadline to set up designated local areas as gnatcatcher habitat.

“It’s just one scientific paper,” Hendron said. “It doesn’t change the threatened species status of the Coastal California gnatcatcher.”

She said that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service submitted the request for a time extension because it hadn’t yet set up the designated gnatcatcher habitats. A federal court ruling in August 1999 ordered the department to set up habitat for the bird after the Natural Resource Defense Council filed suit in 1997.

Officials of the Natural Resource Defense Council in Los Angeles were unavailable for comment.

Since the first of this year, 7.6 million acres of land in Southern California have been designated as potentially critical habitat for species ranging from the gnatcatcher to the red-legged frog and quino checkerspot butterfly, Adams said.

Jim Whalen, owner of J. Whalen & Associates of San Diego, a land development and environmental consulting firm, said the court ruling would affect most of his landowner clients.

The bird is found in coastal sage scrub, he said. That means nearly all the land from the Orange County line to the Mexican border that is west of Alpine could be affected, he added.

“The ruling affects development all over the county, except for the city of San Diego, and I would argue that it affects land there as well,” Whalen said.

Shannon Davis, a spokeswoman for the San Diego Chapter of the Sierra Club, said her organization supported the lawsuit about gnatcatcher habitat. That’s because so much habitat for the birds in San Diego County has already been developed, she said.

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