Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat Draft

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b. craft a general roadmap so all would know what sort of action would be considered if re-initiation of consultations was to be required-to anticipate future reasonable and prudent alternatives; c. to give some assurance to participants that if they were to "sign on" to a recommended plan, they could obtain "regulatory certainty" over reasonable periods of time. Playing the endangered species game has been costly and the stakes had been high. All parties had a need for accommodating the ESA. Collaboration and negotiation would do more for the species-and for preserving the ESA-- than litigation and confrontation. The real impetus for the Platte River Recovery program was to see how well Babbit's plan to radically change the traditional approach to the implementation of the ESA would work. The political objective was to fend off attacks on the ESA directed at gutting it, if not repealing it all together (Echeverria 2001). The Platte basin negotiations have been all about whether or not the ESA can be implemented in a collaborative multi-species, multi-user, multi-state, multi-interest manner. ? By the early 1990's then, the elements were in place. Private goods producers and common ? property water suppliers were caught up in federal relationships from which they could not • extract themselves. To continue their activities, they would have to agree to negotiate a deal that promised to produce a set of collective goods-in the form of protected and improved habitats for ? listed species from which they would be able to gather no greater proportion of benefit than any ? citizen whose barely noticeable sacrifice was to be no more than payment of a tiny increased ? increment in water and power costs. Many beneficiaries would escape even that. Individually • rational water users had a choice; they could have litigated and refused to come to the table. Yet, the workings of ESA under Bruce Babbit and the DOI brought those parties in the nexus to the ? table and kept them there. Agreeing To Talk The Platte Basin arguments at McConaughy, Grayrocks, Wildcat, Narrows, Two Forks, and mountain reservoirs along the Colorado Front Range were made vociferously. The draft biological opinions on the Arapaho/Roosevelt National Forest lands represented the first time that the ESA had been applied to existing projects in an effort to protect downstream habitat, crossed state lines and demonstrated the importance of basin-scale work But none of the costly sh-uggle could address the main issue: how to re-regulate the basin flows to accommodate the nations' new environmental policy as mandated by the Congress of the people of the United States. The diverse and subtle forces at work in the Platte river basin, including critical habitat for whooping cranes, the disparate struggles over water proposals in the three basin states illustrated the complexity of policy issues driving decision-making. This kind of high stakes complexity required collaboration to piece together a collectively constructed "reasonable and prudent alternative" to shutting down the water operations that had created jeopardy for listed species. Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbit's desire to find a collaborative way out of what loomed as an impossible quagmire received a boost from a friend of the Clinton administration, then Colorado Governor Roy Romer. Romer was a leading figure in Democratic party politics and would serve as Chairman of the National Democratic Party. He had not placed environmental 48