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NEWS-JOURNAL (Daytona Beach, Florida) 12 July 06 Volusia may ban live gopher turtle burials (Virginia Smith)
Daytona Beach: Volusia County officials are pondering a move that could spare some tortoises slow, painful deaths.
At least three Florida counties restrict the practice of burying gopher tortoises for a fee, a practice that the state allows by issuing "incidental take permits" to landowners and developers. Volusia may soon follow suit.
Land-clearing can trap tortoises inside their deep burrows, and paving or building over them seals their fate. Take permits specify how many tortoises can be legally killed on a property being developed; the state recently issued one for up to 923 tortoises on a parcel near Ormond Beach.
But state-sanctioned tortoise burial has come under increasing fire since the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission voted in June to upgrade the tortoise's status from a "species of special concern" to "threatened."
"A lot more people are aware of this and it's becoming an emotional crisis," said commission biologist Joe Walsh, who reviews incidental take applications from Volusia landowners.
Tortoise experts expect that sometime next year, Florida law will have changed and live burials banned statewide. But one local environmentalist demanded last week that Volusia County ban it now -- following the lead of Collier, Lee, and St. Lucie counties.
"I just wanted to get it out there to say we've gotta quit doing this," said Betty O'Laughlin, president of the Volusia/Flagler Environmental Council. Last Thursday, O'Laughlin brought her concerns to the Volusia County Council, and council members tapped environmental manager Stephen Kintner to come up with a plan.
Kintner said his staff, in the coming weeks, will recommend that live burials be banned in Volusia County. All gopher tortoises would have to be relocated to safety.
Joan Berish, the commission's top tortoise scientist, lauded Volusia for taking the idea seriously. "There's a 'coalition of the willing' working with us and may even supercede us in some cases," she said. "More and more counties are coming on board."
The ban, if passed into law by the council, would supercede the more lenient state laws. The development community is not likely to oppose it, said Susan Darden, executive officer of the Volusia Home Builders Association.
"Obviously from the state level down the whole thing's messed up," Darden said. "There's nobody who wants to go kill gopher tortoises, but the options are extremely limited. If they can move them, they'd be happy to move them, but if any of them test for diseases you can't move them."
Still, a county ban could be incredibly complicated to enact.
For one, an obsolete disease-testing rule is still in place.
It was once believed that a common, flu-like infection among gopher tortoises was fatal, and any tortoises that tested for it could not be moved. (In the case of Plantation Oaks, a planned subdivision near Ormond Beach, the disease-testing rule all but forced the developer to apply to bury 923 tortoises.) The disease has since proven less grave than feared, and the state plans to eliminate testing -- but no one knows when.
And a county ban would be unlikely to reverse the permits already issued -- including Plantation Oaks' controversial permit for 923 animals.
Ormond's Halifax Plantation subdivision has also applied for new take permits, but the number of tortoises involved is yet unknown. Kintner said he doubts any of these permits would be nullified by a county ban.
Further, if the county wants to ban live burials, it will have to relocate the animals somewhere -- and those details have yet to be hammered out. Kintner said the county is looking at a large parcel owned by the St. Johns River Water Management District, but that it's far from a done deal.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's Walsh said well-meaning counties have gotten themselves in trouble banning live burial without adequate plans for the tortoises. "Their hearts are in the right place and they can do a lot," Walsh said. "But if they go and do it without coming up with land (for the tortoises) they'll cause friction."
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Headlines/frtHEAD03071206.htm