DATE: Thursday, March 20, 1997              TAG: 9703200499

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: FROM WIRE REPORTS 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   95 lines

COURT RULES LANDOWNERS CAN SUE UNDER ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT.

In a major victory for property-rights advocates, the Supreme Court opened federal courtrooms Wednesday to lawsuits seeking less government protection of endangered plants and animals.

The 9-0 decision is expected to encourage landowners to file lawsuits against the federal government when they believe they are harmed by efforts to save species.

Lower courts had ruled that only people seeking to promote the preservation of species could sue under the Endangered Species Act.

Sharply disagreeing, the Supreme Court found it ``readily apparent'' that another objective of the act ``is to avoid needless economic dislocation produced by agency officials zealously but unintelligently pursuing their environmental objectives,'' Judge Antonin Scalia wrote.

Government agencies must use the best available scientific and commercial data ``to ensure that the Endangered Species Act not be implemented haphazardly, on the basis of speculation or surmise,'' Scalia said.

The ruling will help numerous landowners, developers and property-rights leaders, especially in the West, who have long resented federal enforcement of environmental laws. U.S. agencies, they say, frequently exceed their legal authority and cause unnecessary economic harm to landowners in order to protect threatened species.

The court succeeded in accomplishing something that congressional Republicans had hoped to achieve through legislation. A bill introduced this year by House Republicans would specifically recognize the rights of property owners to file citizen suits over alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act.

``It's a home run for equal access to the courts, a home run for property rights,'' said Reed Hopper, a lawyer for the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

``It levels the playing field so that those most affected by species preservation, the landowners, also get their day in court,'' Hopper said. ``Most potential plaintiffs have been reluctant to bring suits because the rule on standing (the right to sue) was a hurdle they could not jump. We're going to see more suits now.''

While the Supreme Court decision will allow many landowners into court, environmentalists said they still would face the formidable task of proving that the federal government disregarded the law in attempting to protect threatened species.

The ruling directly allows two ranch operators and two irrigation districts to challenge the federal government's decision to increase water levels in two reservoirs in the Klamath Irrigation Project in southern Oregon and northern California.

The government's asserted goal was to preserve the habitats of two endangered species of fish, the Lost River sucker and the shortnose sucker.

But the suit alleged that the government, by reducing the amount of water available for irrigation, forced some ranchers to watch their crops die in the fields and to sell off cattle they couldn't feed.

The challengers said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service used a flawed biological study and ignored the economic damage to landowners. They said there was no evidence that the sucker population was diminishing or that higher water levels in the Clear Lake and Gerber reservoirs would benefit the suckers.

A federal judge in Eugene, Ore., and the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in California, the most overturned regional federal court in the nation, dismissed the lawsuit. They concluded that only people seeking to preserve endangered species could sue under the Endangered Species Act.

The Supreme Court, reversing the 9th Circuit for the 12th time this term, noted that the act says ``any person may commence a civil suit.''

That is ``an authorization of remarkable breadth when compared with the language that Congress ordinarily uses,'' Scalia said. And, he added, there is no basis for saying that the authorization ``applies to environmentalists alone.''

Numerous state governments, property-rights groups and agricultural organizations supported the ranchers' fight for more Klamath Project water, saying they have serious economic complaints of their own.

Environmentalists, for their part, uncharacteristically stayed away from the Klamath Project case, Bennett vs. Spear. They explained that they could support neither the Clinton administration's restricted view of the right to sue, nor the landowners' drive to reduce species protection.

``I actually agree with'' the court's decision, said Bill Snape, a lawyer for Defenders of Wildlife. ``It demolishes an argument that the far right in Congress uses in seeking to gut the Endangered Species Act - that the government doesn't take socioeconomic impact into account and that the poor little landowner has no recourse.

``There's no doubt this ruling will bring more suits, but eventually the landowners will see that their cases will be very hard to win.'' MEMO: This story was compiled from reports by Knight-Ridder News Service

and The Washington Post. KEYWORDS: U.S. SUPREME COURT RULING LAWSUIT U.S. FEDERAL

GOVERNMENT ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT

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