THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 3, 1994 TAG: 9411030009
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A18 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
Add one more skirmish to the war Gov. George Allen's administration is waging with federal bureaucrats eager to bind the state in red tape: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, responding to a suit by national conservation groups, has closed most of Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge to people - and effectively barred Virginians' access to adjacent False Cape State Park at the very times of year when it's most visited. It seems that hikers and bikers on the dikes and trails the Wildlife Service built through the refuge keep the birds from feeding and resting optimally so as to fly north and breed optimally.
This is a skirmish on several fronts.
Start with Congress, which writes endangered-species legislation that lets federal bureaucrats and environmental activists from anywhere set public policy on public property anywhere to suit themselves. This is the same Congress which from fear of political fallout in this election year failed to reauthorize that legislation with amendments introducing some economic impact analysis and people-impact input sorely missing from endangered-species law.
This is the same snail's-pace Congress which we can hope will be usurped by a Supreme Court which seems increasingly inclined to move against this phenomenon: that anybody who decides he doesn't like an environmental impact anywhere can sue or petition to override the wishes of people who'll have to live cheek-by-jowl with the con-se-quences.
Virginia has been resisting the activists' push to give themselves or anybody else the standing to sue to reverse a state policy or decision whether they have a material interest in the outcome or not. In fact, they seem to demand that standing precisely to deny public or private property owners any material gain or use from their property.
The Allen administration must continue to resist this push, else we'll see even more actions that would be silly if they weren't so destructive: actions such as the recent petition to make the North Landing River in Virginia Beach's southern half a Tier III scenic waterway, a designation usually reserved for trout streams. Not only would that designation stop even controlled development in the city's southern and northern halves. Not only would that designation make pouring a cup of Quibell in that river verboten. But the the petition itself was as poorly drawn as the law which outlines the petition process: It requires, for starters, no official notice from either the petitioners (who can be from anywhere) or the state to the locality. The state Department of Environmental Quality has held hearings to decide how best to remedy that oversight.
The public is right tired of having all the consideration, the enjoyment of natural habitat and whopping sums of public money going solely to the geese, the owls and the lucky few who live within sight or work within the perimeters of federal wildlife refuges. The policy ought to be geared to coexistence, peaceful and prosperous for animal and human alike. The forbidding policy we get instead has to make us wonder whether not the birds, not park visitors but federal bureaucrats and environmental activists aren't nature's least adaptable creatures. by CNB