KVIG Informative

A single federal decision in 1990 forced Las Vegas to start paying, acre by acre, for every subdivision it built in desert tortoise habitat. Clark County’s permit to keep doing that expires in 2031, and the county’s own numbers show it is running out of room before it runs out of time.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Mojave population of the desert tortoise as a threatened species on March 28, 1990, according to the agency’s announcement that day. The listing covered tortoises found north and west of the Colorado River, in eastern California, southern Nevada, northwestern Arizona and southwestern Utah, the announcement states. The Mojave population had already been under emergency protection as an endangered species since August 1989, according to the same announcement, with that temporary status due to expire within days of the March decision.

The Fish and Wildlife Service cited habitat deterioration and loss, disease and a range of human uses of the desert as its reasons for the listing, according to its announcement. The agency said habitat loss was especially severe in the western Mojave, the Las Vegas area and the St. George area of Utah. Then-Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan said the tortoise’s fate was linked to the growing number of demands being placed on the desert Southwest and that the government intended to do everything feasible to save it, according to the announcement. Then-Fish and Wildlife Service Director John Turner said the new status meant Mojave tortoises would be protected from killing, harm, collection and trade in interstate or foreign commerce.

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Most of the Mojave tortoise’s range sits on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and federal agencies became required to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service before permitting projects that could harm the species, according to the 1990 announcement. Las Vegas-area development came to a standstill under a moratorium on new construction in tortoise habitat, according to a Clark County Desert Conservation Program presentation on the history of the county’s conservation permit. The county lifted that moratorium in 1991 under a short-term habitat conservation plan, the presentation states, buying time while officials worked out a longer-term solution.

Clark County adopted its Desert Conservation Plan in 1995, described in the county’s own presentation as a longer-term plan built around the desert tortoise. That plan gave way to the county’s current Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan, whose 30-year incidental take permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service took effect in February 2001 and expires Jan. 31, 2031, according to the presentation. Under the permit, developers disturbing tortoise habitat can pay a fee instead of seeking their own individual federal permit, the presentation states. That fee stands at $550 per acre of disturbance today, according to the same source.

The permit authorizes disturbance of up to 167,650 acres across Clark County and some highway segments in tortoise habitat outside the county, according to the presentation. As of the county’s most recent figures, developers and agencies had used 79% of that authorized total, leaving 34,634 acres available. The fee program has collected $64.4 million since 2001, the presentation states, on top of $50 million in federal land-sale grant funding spent on tortoise conservation through this past June. Total program spending across more than 1,600 projects has reached $136.7 million, according to the same presentation.

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A separate piece of the region’s tortoise infrastructure ran into its own funding trouble years earlier. The Desert Tortoise Conservation Center near Las Vegas, operated by San Diego Zoo Global in partnership with the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Nevada Department of Wildlife, ended its pickup service for unwanted pet tortoises on Jan. 29, 2013, according to a joint announcement from the three agencies. The agencies said funding to run the center had declined along with the Las Vegas-area economy, leaving it unable to keep absorbing the thousands of former pets already there. The partners said they were shifting the center’s mission away from serving as a holding facility for unwanted pets and toward range-wide recovery research, training field biologists and public education, according to the announcement.

None of that changes the arithmetic Clark County is running against its own clock. The county’s conservation permit has five years left and, by its own count, roughly a fifth of its authorized acreage. Every acre Las Vegas keeps clearing for rooftops between now and January 2031 draws down a balance the county cannot refill without going back to federal regulators and renegotiating the deal that let the valley keep building around a species it was never supposed to be able to touch.