Dr. Steve Rosen's Story - Florida Hometown Democracy Part III

PART III- Gopher tortoise not really protected

The way around the stringent protections offered by the Endangered Species Act is the so called Candidate Conservation Agreement or CCA. A CCA is a “private” contract like you or I might undertake with someone who builds a home or provides some other service that completely bypasses the Endangered Species Act and allows this flimsy approach to protecting the animals. This agreement can have whatever policies, protections or other stipulations that the parties forming it want to include. The bottom line is that, based on research by my attorney which is in my possession, these so-called CCA’s NEVER WORK. The animals covered by these private agreements always lose out.

When my attorney attempted to attend a second meeting with these sociopaths at Booz Allen, in Atlanta, Georgia, he was initially invited and prepared to go. He reserved a hotel room, rented a car and bought his airline tickets. Two weeks before the meeting, he received a phone call telling him he could not attend the meeting. He could be arrested if he appeared. Apparently, the wildlife goons were aware of who he was and were refusing to attend the meeting if he were there. This second meeting was to finalize terms for the Candidate Conservation Agreement.Thus my attorney and I had to eat some of the costs involved with canceling his trip.

The group goes by the acronym SERPPAS for South East Regional Partnership for Planning and Sustainability. The gopher tortoise CCA can be found by clicking on the “projects” link at the left and scrolling down to the bottom of the page. CLICK HERE for a link to the page. Scroll down to the end of that page for the link to the final Gopher Tortoise CCA that they cooked up for the phony protection of the gopher tortoise.

in my opinion, all of these dealings, "winings and dinings" were done behind the backs of Florida voters in violation of the Sunshine laws. The Fla. Fish and Wildlife Con-mission never listed any of this material on their web site because they do not want the public to know about it. I handed a stack of documents from these meetings to Dave Fleshler who promptly killed the story asking me why I am complaining because he writes stories about the gopher tortoise.

With these defeats, my attorney advised me to try to force US Fish and Wildlife to review the Endangered Species Act application for the gopher tortoise. I learned that even if they did agree to review the application and even if they agreed to offer the protection, you still need to protect the habitat as a separate action. That would never happen given the politics involved in massive uncontrolled development power in Florida. There was no way I was going to win this, or was there?

Steve Rosen

Next Sunday is the conclusion to Dr. Rosen's story and his payback on politicians.

Dr. Rosen's Story Part II

Dr. Rosen's Story Part I