excerpt follows...

A now-retired federal official said he bowed to political pressure from a higher-up in the Trump administration when he reversed a key decision he had made on a 28,000-home Benson development near the San Pedro River.

“I got rolled,” said Steve Spangle, who was a top U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official in Phoenix.

A “high-level politico” at the Interior Department pressured him through an attorney in its Solicitor’s Office, Spangle told the Arizona Daily Star in a recent interview.

Spangle’s resulting reversal on the Villages at Vigneto development, in a letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in October 2017, smoothed the project’s path to get its federal Clean Water Act permit.

His earlier, 2016 decision would have required a detailed biological analysis of the proposed development’s impacts on endangered species. Rescinding it allowed the Corps to issue the permit without the lengthy analysis.

 

By “rolled,” Spangle said he meant: “I made a decision that was in my purview to make. I was overruled by somebody who didn’t have my kind of experience. I used that phrase to distinguish it from making a policy call based on fact, as opposed to making a policy call based on politics. I had a strong feeling this was a political decision on their part.”

Interior spokesman denies allegations...

end of excerpt

Rincon Group / Our Blogs / Water / Lawsuits / The Villages at Vigneto / . . .