Released: October 24, 2001

(WASHINGTON) A coalition of 18 international, national, and regional conservation and wildlife protection organizations today served federal officials with formal notice that they have flagrantly breached a landmark legal agreement designed to protect Florida's highly endangered manatees.

In a letter to the U.S. Justice Department dated October 24, the coalition - plaintiffs in a manatee protection lawsuit filed in January 2000 against the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) -- charges that DOI failed to adopt a comprehensive network of manatee refuges and sanctuaries, in violation of deadlines forth in a court-approved settlement agreement reached between parties in January 2001.

It is also maintained that DOI continues to give the green light to coastal development projects in critical manatee habitat despite the lack of on-water protections, including speed zones, signage, and enforcement measures, required under the agreement.

The letter further charges that DOI has adopted a new "interim guidance" document -- which is used to determine whether and where new water access projects may be built -- that will be far more harmful to manatees than the one agreed upon in the settlement.

As a result of the new guidance document, tens of million of dollars in critically needed funds that would have been available for manatee speed zone enforcement and other manatee conservation efforts over the next ten years will no longer be collected by the federal government. At the same time, the DOI announced that it is giving the green light to hundreds of thousands of new piers, docks, and other water access projects in counties where hundreds of manatees have already been killed and thousands have been wounded from boat strikes in the past.

"Gale Norton's Interior Department has taken it upon itself to unilaterally and illegally rewrite a court-approved agreement in an effort to avoid fulfilling its legal obligations to protect the Florida manatee," said Eric Glitzenstein, attorney for the coalition.

Under that new agreement, DOI committed to a "firm and rapid" schedule for the designation of a network of new manatee refuges throughout peninsular Florida. It was required by the settlement to propose these refuges and sanctuaries for public comment on April 2, 2001, and submit a final rule by September 28, 2001.

Instead, DOI has states that it will not even consider adopting a final rule until December 1, 2002 -- more than a year after the deadline for final action set forth in the settlement document -- and may never adopt the refuges and sanctuaries required by the settlement.

What is the reasons for these delays?

"The DOI is using a separate legal settlement reached between conservation groups and the State of Florida as an excuse to avoid its legal obligations, claiming that it desires to let the State take the lead in this process," said Glitzenstein.

But Gale Norton's desire to defer to the State on a federally listed endangered species cannot excuse the federal government from its legal obligations, he notes.

"The settlement unequivocally requires the federal government to adopt federal refuges and sanctuaries throughout peninsular Florida irrespective of any actions the FWCC may or may not undertake under its separate agreement," says Glitzenstein.

Glitzenstein pointed to the dire situation in Lee County to highlight the adverse effects of Norton's settlement violations. Nineteen manatees have already been killed by boats there this year -- far more than in any other county -- accounting for nearly 30% of all the watercraft-related deaths throughout Florida. Yet DOI is refusing to move forward with any refuge or sanctuary designation there, even though it knows that the State of Florida has no intention of addressing the crisis in Lee County any time in the foreseeable future. At the same time, DOI is allowing hundreds of new water access projects to proceed throughout Lee County, thus setting the state for even greater mortality and injury.

The settlement with Florida -- in which the State committed to considering new manatee "safe havens" and speed zones under Florida law -- is currently bogged down in a cumbersome hearing process that may drag on for a year or more, says Helen Spivey, co-chair of the Save the Manatee Club. In the meantime, not a single new manatee protection measure has gone into effect under either federal or state law, although manatees continue to be killed in huge numbers -- with 65 killed by boats in just the first nine months of 2001. If that harrowing pace continues, a new all-time record for boat-caused manatee mortalities will be set.

We filed these suits because neither the federal nor the state agencies were enforcing existing manatee protection laws, and because of the escalating number of manatees killed by watercraft every year," says Spivey. "With the settlement of these lawsuits, we expected rapid and good faith efforts to implement the agreed-upon protections for the manatees. Tragically, the current situation smacks of 'politics as usual,' and it is the Florida manatee that will suffer the consequences.

Spivey notes that the federal foot-dragging likely stems as much from a new Interior Department that makes no bones about its anti-environmental positions, as a Republican administration eager to lend political help to Florida Governor Jeb Bush by delaying action on a highly charged issue. Bush is seeking a second term as governor in the coming year. It is hardly coincidental that the new deadlines advanced by the Fish and Wildlife Service for designation of federal sanctuaries and refuges happen to fall after next year's gubernatorial election," she observes.

"I was in state politics here in Florida long enough to know how things are done," says Spivey, who served as a Florida state representative from 1994 to 1996.

Political futures aside, it is the manatee's future that is at stake, says Judith Vallee, executive director of Save the Manatee Club.

"Without these sanctuaries and refuges, the Florida manatee is unlikely to survive," said Vallee. "By circumventing the settlement agreement, Gale Norton and the Department of the Interior are saying in the crassest possible terms that they don't care. Frankly, we are outraged. We are tired of the government not doing its job. We are tired of rhetoric and bad faith. We are tired of the escalating manatee mortality."