Protecting the Land

According to the Lily Point website, Stanton Northwest has done some initial work on the property that abuts the Lily Point Reserve/Park in Point Roberts, including cutting down trees and brush. I suppose once you own property, you can pretty much do whatever pruning and trimming and mowing you want to do, even if it is, in fact, some kind of site preparation for a project for which you don’t yet have approval. Of course, if that site work includes taking down trees that are eagle nest habitat, that is a different matter. I can imagine that for lots of people, the idea that a developer would be restricted from developing land he/she owned because it would inconvenience local bald eagles is an outrage or at least news. But whether it’s an outrage or not, it’s a law.

Some years back, when we were building a smallish outbuilding on our property so that I could have some space in which to quilt, we went down to Bellingham to get permits for the building. I’d never been involved in that particular kind of citizen/government exchange and was both interested and puzzled by the nature of the process. I can certainly understand, after that several hour activity, why people get so angry about bureaucrats, but the thing that most surprised me was the eagle issue. We went through person after person getting okays for various aspects of the project (keep in mind that the permit was for a 24x12 ft. structure without water/plumbing) and, at the very end, we were interviewed by the eagle person. She looked up on a map and determined that we were within the area of an active eagle nest which, she said, could change everything. The tree with nest wasn’t on our property, and in any case we weren’t proposing to cut down any trees. But it turns out that if you are planning to build anything that is within the area of an active eagle nest, there are additional regulations, including specific times of the year in which you may not build. This all happened some years ago and I can’t recall the specific months (in the spring, though), but it surely surprised me to find that that was the last approval we needed. After all, if we’d actually had an eagle nest on the property, the rules would have been even more stringent. Since it would have been a deal breaker, I would have thought they’d check that issue out first.

Anyway, I have some minor experience with eagle rules and can well imagine that there are people not too impressed with the idea that eagles would take preference over their own plans. The people at lilypoint.org say they have evidence that trees with eagle nests have been cut down, which would definitely be a violation of the law. They have a new video on their site to accompany that claim. I don’t have any independent evidence, but trees come down all the time on the Point, and not always from natural causes.

I still have trouble believing that a company with a relatively small repertoire of finished work is going to be able to find financial backing for a Point Roberts project that involves as many as one hundred homes in the million dollar range in these times of difficult credit and a dead housing market. Indeed, if they had such funding, I’d want to know the name of the bank that’s providing it so I could be sure I didn’t have any investments/accounts in that bank. This development may not be realized. But it would indeed be sad if in that process of not happening, the terrain of the land were irreparably destroyed by a lot of clearing and deforesting.

Does the County know or care? I guess we’ll find out. On October 11 (10 a.m.), the P.R. Taxpayers Association will be holding a meeting at the Community Center about the Stanton Northwest development proposal and the County’s zoning views. Everyone welcome to attend, I’m told.

10/1/08, Follow-up: A friend points out that the bald eagle is no longer on the endangered species act (as of June, 2007). However, there are still many federal and state laws that deal with eagles and eagle habitat. The most recent (February '08) information on Washington law is here.