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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has suspended a permit issued under the Trump administration that would have allowed a proposal to move forward to build 28,000 new homes near Arizona’s San Pedro River. Environmental groups sued in 2019 under a provision of the Clean Water Act that regulates the discharge of dredged material into streams, washes, and wetlands, arguing the federal government should have analyzed the potential harm to the San Pedro River as part of its analysis.
The Army Corps' reversal is just the latest obstacle to the controversial home-building project, known as the "Villages at Vigneto." Opponents of the development have argued that the groundwater pumping to supply the homes would threaten the San Pedro River, including parts of a national conservation area and the wetlands at St. David Cienega. Robin Silver with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said of the decision, "The Army Corps and the Fish and Wildlife Service decided that they don’t want to actually let Vigneto suck dry St. David Cienega or destroy the northern part of the national conservation area. We don’t know why. But their action stands for itself."
In 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that a Clean Water Act permit approval for Vigneto was not likely to threaten or harm endangered species. A review of the FWS' 2017 decision was triggered by revelations from a now retired FWS official, Steve Spangle, who spoke out in 2019 about improper political interference by a Trump administration appointee at the Interior Department. After issuing an initial recommendation to the Army Corps that the FWS should conduct a full biological assessment to examine whether the development would affect threatened and endangered species, Spangle said he received a call from a lawyer at the Interior Department’s headquarters, who told him that a "very high-ranking" political appointee believed he had made an incorrect decision, and that he would be "wise to reconsider it," which led Spangle to reverse his initial decision.
In light of the FWS' reversal this week, Spangle said, "I have steadfastly believed that formal consultation was the appropriate path forward, and that the interference from the Secretary’s office was blatantly political and inappropriate. As a career professional who believed my original call was the right one and who had never been rolled like this, it made my decision to retire under that administration an easy one."
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What we are seeing is unprecedented. You're not supposed to break records by seven to nine degrees Fahrenheit. This is such an exceptional event that we can't rule out the possibility that we're experiencing heat extremes today that we only expected to come at higher levels of global warming."
