OPINION/COMMENTARY

FEDERAL PRAIRIE DOG FINE IS LEGAL, SAYS APPEALS BOARD

A $15,000 fine assessed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) against a southern Utah landowner is legal, an ad hoc panel of the U.S. Department of the Interior Board of Land Appeals ruled today nearly two years after Mr. Lin Drake, of Cedar City, Utah, filed his appeal. In rejecting Drake’s appeal, the panel concluded that the FWS need not produce evidence that any prairie dogs had been injured or killed by the physical changes that Drake made to purported prairie dog habitat on his land. Mr. Drake had argued that an administrative law judge (ALJ) had erred by approving the FWS’s fine because he neither “harmed” nor “harassed” prairie dogs, as defined in the Endangered Species Act (ESA). “By its decision today, the federal government has ruled that, simply by using his private property to construct single-family homes, Lin Drake violated the federal law when he ‘disturbed’ the habitat of protected prairie dogs, thus ‘harming’ and ‘harassing’ them,” said William Perry Pendley of Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represents Drake....