ESA – The fleecing of a nation

As taxpayers we complain incessantly about the amount of money the federal government spends. These days 42 cents of every dollar is borrowed, making the waste of taxpayer dollars even more of an outrage. But we have on the books laws that cost an inordinate amount of money, don’t really do anything and mainly benefit the legal community. We speak, of course, of the Endangered Species Act and a basketful of related environmental laws. Only a handful of species have recovered using the law. Some of those “recoveries” involved little more than moving the animals from one place to another...The ESA is also used to stop any number of activities, from construction projects to ranching to cutting weeds. A recent example of that last activity took place in California, home of the Los Padres National Forest. Managers there had planned to clear roadside brush and weeds along 750 miles of forest roads. An environmental group sued to stop the work, arguing that cutting the weeds threaten protected and sensitive species. Mind you, all of the work would take place within 10 feet of the road. To protect this “sensitive” environment, the judge in the case issued an injunction and ordered to the U.S. Forest Service to hire a full-time biologist. According to the simplyhired.com website, a federal biologist makes about $56,000 a year, plus benefits. That’s about $26.92 an hour. Assuming the weed-cutting takes place on both sides of the roads — a total of 1,500 miles — is done at 1 mph, that’s 1,500 hours. Multiply that by the hourly pay rate, and that’s a little over $40,000. That’s $40,000 for nothing. And don’t forget the federal government will have to pay the legal fees of the environmental group’s lawyers and those who represented the Forest Service. It should also be noted that many environmental groups want to get rid of roads in national forests and allow the forests to revert to nature sanctuaries. Maybe, just maybe, the real issue in this and other cases was the roads and not the “sensitive” species...more