Wolf Expansion - Dog and Pony Show

[Snapshot]

From: The White Mountain Independent

 

 

Wolf hearing was a dog and pony show sham

Karen Warnick - The Independent

Karen Warnick - The Independent

Posted: Tuesday, August 19, 2014 5:00 am

21 comments

The Aug. 11 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service public hearing on the Proposed Draft Environmental Impact Statement on the wolf expansion program was a total done deal before anyone set foot in the Hon-Dah conference center.

The FWS was sued by environmental groups over the wolf expansion in what has become known as sue and settle litigation. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce published a report last May on this issue called: Sue and Settle: Regulating Behind Closed Doors.

The report explains the process: “Typically, the federal government defends itself vigorously against lawsuits challenging its actions. But not always: Sometimes regulators are only too happy to face collusive lawsuits by friendly ‘foes’ that are aimed at compelling government action that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to achieve. Rather than defend these cases, regulators settle them in a phenomenon known as ‘sue and settle.’ This tactic has exploded under the Obama Administration, costing the economy tens of billions of dollars while eroding political accountability and public participation in government.”

This explains why in previous public hearings over the wolf and the Environmental Protection Agency’s sudden decisions on the Haze Rule in 2011, comments against the proposals were basically ignored.

In the case of the wolf expansion to most of Arizona and New Mexico, the decision has already been made — by the environmental groups that sued.

“When such lawsuits were initiated, EPA does not disclose the notice of the lawsuit or its filing until a settlement agreement had been worked out with the private parties and filed with the court. As a result, court orders were entered, binding the agency to undertake a specific rulemaking within a specific and usually very short time period, notwithstanding whether the agency actually had sufficient time to perform the obligations imposed by the court order. With no public input, EPA binds itself to the demands of a private entity with special interests that may be adverse to the public interest, especially in the areas of project development and job creation. Sue and settle activities deny the public its most basic of all rights in the regulatory process: the right to weigh in on a proposed regulatory decision before agency action occurs,” the report says.

These settlement agreements are done with no public or state knowledge or ability to intercede. The settlements almost always favor what the suing parties want.

Though sue-and-settle litigation goes back to the Clinton Administration, the numbers have increased in the past five years. Between 2009 and 2012, 71 lawsuits were settled. Those settlements and the 100 new regulations that came out of them have cost the taxpayers of this country over $488 billion.

The EPA and FWS are most often targeted but other lawsuits have been brought against the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, departments of Interior and Agriculture, Army Corps of Engineers and Department of Commerce.

Guess who’s doing the suing the most? Yup, Sierra Club, Wildearth Guardians, Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife and several others.

“By being able to sue and influence agencies to take actions on specific regulatory programs, advocacy groups use sue-and-settle to dictate the policy and budgetary agendas of an agency. Instead of agencies being able to use their discretion on how best to utilize their limited resources, they are forced to shift these resources away from critical duties in order to satisfy the narrow demands of outside groups,” notes the report.

“For all of these reasons, sue and settle violates the principle that if an agency is going to write a rule, then the goal should be to develop the most effective, well-tailored regulation. Instead, rulemakings that are the product of sue and settle agreements are most often rushed, sloppy, and poorly conceived.

“They usually take a great deal of time and effort to correct, when the rule could have been done right in the first place if the rulemaking process had been conducted properly.

“In cases where EPA allows public comment on draft consent decrees, EPA only rarely alters the consent agreement—even after it receives adverse comments.

“Sue and settle agreements cut this critical step entirely out of the process. Rather than hearing from a range of interested parties and designing the rule with a panoply of their concerns in mind, the agency essentially writes its rule to accommodate the specific demands of a single interest. Through sue and settle, advocacy groups achieve their narrow goals at the expense of sound and thoughtful public policy.”

That statement above says it all. And it’s not just the EPA.

None of the comments by ranchers, politicians and concerned citizens will be taken into consideration. They were just politely giving us the illusion that they were listening. They weren’t. It’s already been decided. There will be more wolves in Arizona whether we want them or not and we don’t have a say in it at all.

So much for the rights of citizens and states. It seems the environmentalists and the federal government have all the rights.

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Your tax dollars at work. They had this meeting just to tell everyone FU. We do what we want and you can't do anything about it. If you know anyone in favor of this program you oughta bust em in the mouth every time you see em. If our wonderful azgfd woulda shown some backbone from the beginning it would help their image. Get ready Az. Now you all get to see what the folks who live in the original area have been putting up with for 20 years. Lark.

[4Falls]

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