By David Wojick
The organization is no secret. It is the Wyoming Golden Eagle Working Group or WY-GOEA-WG, which has a nice little website here.
They even list their 98 present members on their about page, including a lot of federal officials. What is secret is what these folks do. They have a group listserv and recently held their annual meeting, but both are for members only. They appear to have never issued a report on their activities, a study, or even a press release. No hint as to what all these people talk about. My requests for communication were all refused.
As near as I can tell, this group is focused on the business and policy side of wind turbines killing golden eagles, especially in Wyoming. Eagle killing is a big wind business activity in several important ways, and this group looks like a lot of the people involved in those activities.
Members are grouped by the outfit they work for and listed by job title, so presumably they represent their employer. There are 29 feds, or 30%, so this is to a significant degree a federal deal. There are profound eagle-kill policy issues here, so the secrecy is very concerning. This group looks like a Federal Advisory Committee whose deliberations are supposed to be public.
There are three primary wind power business and policy activities that involve the Federal Government and wind turbines killing golden eagles.
First, if a wind farm includes federal land, there will be an environmental assessment (EA) that includes such killing. The EA will be prepared by the agency owning the land, but the developer does a lot of the analytical work.
Second, all wind farms must obtain and operate under a permit to kill eagles under the Eagle Protection Act. These eagle-kill permits are issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Application and operation both involve a lot of work.
Third, in many cases, the wind farm will have to pay a substantial “compensatory mitigation” fee to utilities to try to reduce eagle deaths from electrocution on power lines.
The non-federal members appear to mostly represent consultants who do work in these three areas. There are also several major wind farm developers. That these two groups, which have clear pro-wind financial interests, are secretly engaged with federal officials is very disturbing.
There are also members from scientific organizations that may or may not have direct financial ties to federal eagle-kill activities. There are also a few members with no stated affiliation.
That the central focus is eagle-kill permitting is strongly suggested by FWS having 23 members, or just under half the Feds. The Bureau of Land Management is also up there with seven members, which brings in the EA function. So does the Wyoming Fish and Game Department with six members, as the state also looks at impact.
On the wind farm side, PacifiCorp has four members, Powder River Energy has two, and several other developers have one each.
The top consultant is West, Inc with 6 members. FWS permits sometimes require two-year operational impact studies, which West often does. Most of the consultants just have one or two members, but there are a lot of them, likely looking for new work.
It should be noted that a lot of the members operate at the national and regional levels, not just in Wyoming. It thus seems likely that the Working Group will discuss national and regional policy issues and practices. In these cases, the secrecy goes way beyond Wyoming, which is far more disturbing.
The Wyoming Golden Eagle Working Group started in 2017, following the last minute 2016 promulgation of major new eagle protection regulations. These were Obama rules, so it is no surprise that we find feds and wind interests working together behind closed doors.
This secrecy must end. Federal agencies working in secret with wind interests, while golden eagles are being killed in large numbers, is not acceptable.
