Posted by Joanie Dranginis

To whom it may concern,
I have been tracking the progress of the Ca. Tiger Salamander Strategy Plan for the Santa Rosa Plain for Madrone for the past 5 months.

Recently, a draft of the Plan has been officially made available to the public. I am making it available to you with the following websites that have been set up at Dept. of Fish and Game. I found the easiest one to access is Ed Brauner's MS version. Just go to the draft strategy doc. which is 47 pages. The rest is appendices and tables of contents etc. This may be the final draft that the public will comment on in early Sept.

There are still issues to resolve.

1) It's not clear how the Cities (SR,RP,Cotati) want to implement the Plan or what changes they still want. We are very concerned about this. Keith is in a meeting today with the Cities and the strategy Team to figure this out.

2) Environmentalists generally are not happy with the mitigation ratios and would like to see them strengthened. Also, conservation areas are of varying quality as habitat, and many have not been studied.

3) Center for Biological Diversity still has a ruling pending in court as to the status of the Sonoma County pop. of CTS. They challenged FWS' delisting to threatened, and want it restored to endangered status based on the science.

4) Center for Bio Diversity' lawsuit has resulted in FWS being forced to designate Critical Habitat for the CTS by December 5th, if the Strategy Plan is not signed, sealed and delivered by then. We have plans to talk with the attorney by conference call in Sept, to get her opinion of the Strategy vs. Critcal Habitat (one being voluntary, the other being regulatory). In other words, which is likely to result in the best outcome for the salamander.

I know this is clear as mud, but it will become murkier I'm sure.

Joannie

The SRPCS is over 200 pages long not including maps It is now all at. http://ftp.dfg.ca.gov/Outgoing/Ccr/projects/CTS_sonoma/SRPCS/

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