By David Wojick
Landowners subject to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) can in principle get permits to develop their land from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Under the Paperwork Reduction Act, the FWS is supposed to estimate the average applicant’s labor and expenses in getting a permit. Their estimates are listed in this government-wide database.
As explained below, the labor estimate is clearly prohibitive for most people. This is the first boondoggle.
The cost is likely also prohibitive, but a realistic estimate is missing in action. FWS needs to get honest about the huge cost of ESA development permits. Failure to provide a reasonable cost estimate is the second boondoggle. It may even be a case of administrative fraud.
First, a bit of jargon. This is called an incidental take permit. Under many other wildlife protection laws, the critter is said to be taken if it is directly impacted, such as being killed, injured, harassed, etc. ESA is far broader, so “take” includes affecting the animal’s habitat in ways that might be detrimental. Incidental means the take is not the point of the permitted action.
Over 100 million acres of land and 34,000 miles of streams are presently designated as protected habitat under ESA, so the need for incidental take permits is potentially extensive.
Each incidental take permit must include a detailed Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) which includes a lot of technical ecological analysis. Preparing the HCP is where most of the labor and cost come from. See it here.
FWS provides separate official labor and cost estimates for the preparing the permit application and for doing the Habitat Conservation Plan. Let’s start with the labor estimates.
For preparing the application, the claimed average labor is a mere 3 hours. This is undoubtedly very low because the application requires getting copies of a lot of documents, plus understanding the regulations, etc. But this is nothing compared to doing the HCP.
The official FWS applicant labor estimate for preparing the Habitat Conservation Plan is a staggering 2,080 hours. That is precisely a full person-year of work.
Accepting this huge number for the moment, it is easy to see that few landowners will have the time to apply for a permit. Big organizations with big plans might throw that much staff time at getting a permit. but, short of that, it is just too much work.
What is really scary is this huge number is likely to be way low. Agencies are under great pressure to lowball their labor estimates. The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) imposes a regulatory labor budget on each agency. The total allowable annual labor required under all the agency’s regulations taken together is set by the Office of Management and Budget. (Disclosure: I helped design this “burden budget” system.)
Since every agency wants to bring out new regulations, they need ways to reduce the labor estimates on their existing rules. Sometimes they make meaningful changes, but often they just lie harder and lower the estimates. That the HCP estimate exactly equals 40 hours/week times 52 weeks strongly suggests that it is not a real estimate.
A big flaw in the PRA is that it does not require field sampling of actual labor amounts, so bogus estimates are unconstrained. However, given the drive to minimize them, this huge 2080 hours per permit should be considered the low end of the possibilities. It might take several person-years of labor.
When it comes to cost, the deception gets far worse, as the HCP cost is officially estimated at ZERO. What makes this “no cost” estimate preposterous is that the preparation of HCPs for landowners is a recognized industry.
The FWS permit application form tells applicants to use the agency’s “Habitat Conservation Planning Handbook.” The full title is “Habitat Conservation Planning and Incidental Take Permit Processing Handbook.” It is here.
The official Handbook has an entire section titled “Consultants and Contractors.” Here is the very first sentence:
“Since applicants typically do not have in-house knowledge or experience with the HCP process, they often hire environmental consultants or contractors to assist with preparing the HCP.”
These HCP consultants and contractors cost money. A number of major consultancies are heavily into providing HCP services. For example, the National Habitat Conservation Plan Coalition includes these members: Environmental Science Associates, ICF, SWCA Environmental Consultants, and Zara Environmental. The Coalition promotes the development of regional-scale HCPs, where the consultant members no doubt hope to make big bucks. See https://www.nhcpcoalition.org/
We have little information about what the HCP costs are, but one of the Coalition members has posted a fee system for extending their regional HCP to cover local property development. This is Charlotte County, Florida, which I discuss in my article “Endangered Species Act regulatory overkill.”
The HCP fees are by property size and range from about $2,000 for less than 0.22 acres to over two million dollars for anything over 100 acres. Few people can afford this.
FWS estimates there are 46 large-scale HCPs a year, so the total annual cost could easily be many millions of dollars. Thus, their claim of zero HCP cost is incredibly deceptive. Since it violates the Paperwork Reduction Act, it looks like a clear case of administrative fraud.
The public, landowners, and Congress need to know what Endangered Species Act development permitting actually requires in labor and cost.
Not so fun but directly related story. My sister and her beloved husband Bob bought a ~200 acre ranch in Cle Eland, just over the Snosqualmie Pass east of Seattle. They were raising Palaminio horses. An ‘invasive’ formerly native beaver dammed a pasture stream, and the state then declared half their horse ranch a protected ‘wild wet land’. They were forced to sell. My father bought their ‘protected wildlife half’ and gave it in perpetuity to the NWF, taking it permanently out of the state tax base. With the other half, they then bought 700 acres for a much better (and much cheaper) no beaver very mountainous horse/cattle ranch much further northeast just 30 miles south of the Canadian border in Tonasket. Bob passed there of a heart attack building a finial horse corral. My sister still lives there despite ‘climate change’—meaning she has to get the long farmhouse gravel driveway occasionally plowed each winter.
A fine example of regulatory overkill. The regulators were padding their wetland protection numbers. Technically a beaver pond is an artificial wetland and they usually run less than an acre or so.
Here is a hint, chi’drens. If you think there is an “endangered species” on your property DON’T TELL ANYONE. And bring charges against ANY trespassers, especially environtards and USG employees.
Indeed, that is quite a sad story. I am sorry about the loss of your brother-in-law.
It sometimes happens that a farmer is publicly vilified for having driven away a beaver that was causing him trouble. Environmental activists come out of the woodwork and descend on the poor fellow like a pack of wolves.
Since I live in eastern France, I am very familiar with storks. Because winters are milder, they migrate less frequently—they normally fly to Africa when the weather starts getting cold in Europe—and therefore live more comfortably. Storks are wading birds and extremely voracious. Put a few of them in a field with a stream, and before long there will hardly be a living creature left nearby. They eat everything: frogs, rodents, fish, insects—nothing is spared. This huge increase in the stork population is also harmful to bustard populations, which nest exclusively on the ground and are therefore, along with their broods, extremely vulnerable.
The stork is a protected species, but its population will certainly have to be managed at some point. It may take a while before environmental activists come to understand that.
EDIT: This comment was intended for Rud Istvan. I got my wires crossed when posting it!
They need to know. Certainly.
They need to care? Absolutely.
I heard that the development that burned in a grassland fire near Boulder Colorado called the Marshall Fire about 5 years ago had been caused by building the homes too close together. The footprint for the development was larger originally but because of habitat conservation areas (HCA’s), it had to be built on only about 1/3 the land which resulted in large houses on smaller lots with little space in between them. I can’t find any link to the HCA and the subdivision change in plans but curious if anyone else recalls this story.
There is an old adage about what happens to ‘good intentions.’ Biologists, and scientists in general, do ‘fall in love’ with their work. The ESA was intended for species like whooping cranes and sea turtles which were clearly in trouble. The cranes were down to very few which caused genetic concerns which were wrong as both cranes and turtles are success stories. Whoopers are running out of room and turtles will always be good for food since long storage is easy. We once saw an over a dozen whooper flock outside of any refuge having a nasty ‘argument.’ White animals always have a problem unless they live on snow.
The other biological problem is taxonomic, not so much for these. I knew the author and this is an honest coverage of the turtle problem in Louisiana, Texas and Mexico.
Hildebrand, H. H. 1982. A historical review of the status of sea turtle populations in the western Gulf of Mexico. pp. 447-453, In, K. Bjorndal (Ed.). Biology and Conservation of Sea Turtles.
In my view the ESA law is okay but the regulatory implementation is atrocious. For example the term “harm” in the law has been interpreted to doing stuff in the habitat that merely possibly affects the species.
See my https://www.cfact.org/2026/05/09/endangered-species-act-regulatory-overkill/
And the habitat conservation plan requirements are absurdly burdensome as pointed out above. None of this is required by the law.
I have a thick copy they produced about a New Mexico pipeline at least 3/4 unnecessary and an engineer had to add caliche to the soil environment. There are numerous bad examples, but not all biologists succumbed. The worst one I know of was a failed attempt to put the Virginia oyster on the list which got federal testimony from a Louisiana biologist and many other complaints. Its range is from Canada to Mexico across many estuaries. Large reef structures were at risk both from natural and human reasons but even trying to make them extinct seems impossible, especially given their geological history.
Armchair oyster research papers don’t help showing deeper roots to the problem such as lack of homework which includes relying only on second hand information like from the IPCC. Not a new problem but excesses of literature are perhaps a little legitimate excuse. Also there are lots of new unnecessary terms like “biocomplexity, ecogeomorphology” and too much asking and researching negative questions which overshadow real problems. Two examples–“Human impacts on wetlands occur at all scales, ……human actions would be considered harmful unless proven otherwise.” Despite, or maybe because of, some habitats are still directly or indirectly unnecessarily threatened by dumb human development. I just drove by one, incrementally disappearing but the environment might eventually reclaim it someday.