Builders brace for tougher Endangered Species Act; Antelope Valley developers are especially threatened.

California's building industry -- already buffeted by the state's worst post-war recession, tight credit and tough environmental standards -- could be in for some more bad news this year because new Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt will review and likely beef up the Endangered Species Act of 1973, according to government and private industry sources.

The Secretary of the Interior is charged with overseeing the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and its Endangered Species division. That means the new secretary's personal views on conservation will guide continued modification of the Endangered Species Act, which has to be re-authorized every two years. The act was last re-authorized in 1990, but Congress chose to delay an additional re-authorization until the present session.

California's own Endangered Species Act supersedes the U.S. Endangered Species Act on matters about which California restrictions are tougher.

For instance, the California Department of Fish & Game can list a species as endangered, even if the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service does not. But the California Department of Fish & Game must honor the fed's listings of threatened or endangered species.

If the U.S. Endangered Species Act is made tougher, as is expected, those strengthened federal regulations might supersede existing state regulations, said Vern Goehring, legislative coordinator for the California Department of Fish & Game.

Building industry sources argue that making the Endangered Species Act too tough could kill off future development in Southern California, especially in the Antelope Valley and other outlying areas where land is relatively inexpensive. Those are the areas where most new Los Angeles County homes are expected to be built.

Gregory Matranga, director of government affairs for the Lancaster-based Antelope Valley Region of the Building Industry Association of Southern California, said developers there must conduct environmental impact reports to make sure there are no desert tortoises or Mojave ground squirrels on construction sites. The desert tortoise is listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Mojave ground squirrel is listed as endangered by the California Department of Fish & Game, Matranga said.

Building industry lobbyists further complain that continual toughening of the act will prevent recovery of California's battered construction industry, which has lost 200,000 jobs in the past 18 months.

Review of the Endangered Species Act "will shape up to be one of the biggest fights in Congress this session," said Gina de Ferrara, a staff member of the House subcommittee of Merchant Marine & Fisheries.

Georgia Parn, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, said she does not know exactly when modifications to the Endangered Species Act will be drafted, but said they will likely be drafted sometime in 1993.

To date, every time the Endangered Species Act has come up for reauthorization since its original passage in 1973, Congress has toughened it, according to builders and environmentalists.

David Klinger, spokesman for the Western Regional office of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, said federal regulators keep a close watch on California. But that monitoring has been somewhat futile because the state has been developed so rapidly. As such, habitat that is key to preserving species had been so decimated by the time state and federal regulators started listing species as threatened or endangered that preserving some species in their natural state may already be impossible, Klinger said.

"Saving endangered species' habitat in Southern California is like fighting the war in Vietnam. We don't have the ability to win. Some people say it (the habitat) is too far gone, that we should write it off and concentrate our effort on regions where we can save species," Klinger said.

California species that have been closely watched, and have become subjects of heated debate between developers and environmentalists, include the California gnatcatcher, the Stevens kangaroo rat and the California condor. All three species were nearly wiped out by more than 30 years of unchecked development, Klinger said.

And just a few weeks ago, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service proposed adding a pink-flowered herb, named Braunton's milk vetch, to the endangered species list. That designation would pose a threat to several planned Southland developments.

Some Southern California builders, such as Kaufman & Broad Home Corp., the largest Los Angeles County-based home builder, have resigned themselves to stricter federal restrictions because the Endangered Species Act has been made more restrictive each time it has been renewed.

"The future holds more redevelopment and remodeling for the Southern California construction industry because of the toughening environmental issues," said John Hakel, Southern California Associated General Contractors' executive director.

Kaufman & Broad spokesman Bernie Sandalow said K&B and other California Building Industry Association members are collectively asking U.S. and California wildlife officials to consider that another 5 million people will either move to or be born in California in the next 10 years, and they must have homes.

"Two million of those people will move into the Los Angeles area," Sandalow said.

Most Los Angeles-based home builders are constructing homes in Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties. But Sandalow said L.A.'s greatest area for potential growth is the Antelope Valley. K&B owns vast expanses of land there, where it hopes to eventually build 20,000 homes, Sandalow said.

"Even if the Endangered Species Act gets beefed up, Los Angeles County still needs affordable housing," Sandalow said.

In addition to the expected toughening of the federal Endangered Species Act, the California Department of Fish & Game is expected to soon decide whether to list the Morro Bay manzanita and the Chorro Creek thistle as "endangered" or "threatened." A species is labeled "threatened" when studies show that continued depletion of its habitat will eventually cause extinction of the species. A species is "endangered" when its numbers are so scarce that corrective measures -- such as capturing the remaining species members and breeding them in captivity -- must be carried out to save the species.

Those two plant species are primarily found in the central coastal portion of California, Sandalow said.

In the past, changes to the Endangered Species Act have tightened the environmental impact review developers must provide.

Under current law, development rights are not guaranteed until the builder denudes the site of vegetation. This is commonly known as grubbing and rooting, Hakel said.

"There is a lengthy environmental review process in place now. But any no-growth lobby can create enough doubt about a development's impact on a species that state and federal wildlife officials will call for additional delays while additional studies are made," Hakel said.

Making the environmental review process more stringent will increase developers' costs for consultants and will delay project approval, Hakel asserted. And such delays would increase the amount of interest builders must pay on their construction loans and the carrying costs on their land, Hakel said.

"It would be nice if some kind of partnership could be formed by the builders and environmentalists to create an independent third-party review agency," Hakel suggested.

There has been some talk that the modified Endangered Species Act will call into question development rights in projects that already have received government approval, said Cliff Allenby a Sacramento-based lobbyist for the California Building Industry Association.

"We have to have an understanding of what changes will take place in the (federal) Endangered Species Act before we get a feeling for how the California Endangered Species Act will change," Allenby said.

The California Legislature is expected to review part of its Endangered Species Act this year and, oddly enough, probably make it harder for environmentalists to hold up proposed developments, said legislative analysts.

Under the proposed revisions, if a developer can prove excessive costs would be incurred to preserve a species' habitat at a building site, they may be allowed to proceed, Goehring speculated.

Acting on provisions of the federal Endangered Species Act, the U.S. government spent $10.18 million in 1992 to pay for the studies needed to get 68 species designated as endangered. That is more than double the $4.35 million the feds spent in 1991 to list 66 species. The size of that annual federal outlay is decided each year by Congress.