Surprise: biz group sues to Upgrade a species listing

It’s not every day that a group run by former Bush Administration Interior Department honcho Craig Manson files suit to get the status of a threatened species upgraded to endangered. It’s also not every day that such a group piggybacks on an earlier petition filed by the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. But that’s what’s transpiring in the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta region in northern California in the ongoing drama over the tiny, threatened Delta smelt. A federal judge in that area has been turning the screws on water pumping in the Delta by farmers to insure more reliable water for the smelt, which has suffered significant declines in recent years. The limits on pumping have reduced supplies by 30 to 50 percent to farmers and also threatened higher water rates for some consumers living in that area. The cutbacks have also pared state water deliveries to already parched Southern California. Now, a group calling itself the Council for Endangered Species Act Reliability has filed a suit to force the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the smelt as endangered instead of threatened. So why the litigation? Manson said in interviews that he would like to see the service go beyond what he calls its “Casablanca approach: Round up the usual suspects” — i.e. — water pumping — in fingering blame for the smelt’s declines. If the smelt is uplisted, the service will have to a new analysis of five factors listed in the ESA, and the analysis must be based on new rather than old data, Manson said...read more