25th Annual Meeting and Symposium of the
Desert Tortoise Council, April 21-24, 2000
Abstracts

The Role of the Private Citizen in Public Agency Decisions

Frank Buono
P.O. Box 562, Prineville, Oregon 97754

The private citizen often feels powerless to improve the natural resource decisions of sometimes unresponsive public agencies. But actually, the well-informed citizen is the beneficiary of several important laws that vest much power in the public and compel land managing agencies to abandon defective courses of action in favor of actions that better serve the public interest. Such tools include the Administrative Procedures Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the agency's own statutes, regulations and written procedures. Most powerful among these tools is the Endangered Species Act. Even with such tools, making headway is grueling work when confronting land managing agencies like the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. Two case studies from the Mojave National Preserve in California help illustrate the tools in the citizen's arsenal, the difficulty of gaining success and the sometimes limited nature of the gains. Those examples both involve the desert tortoise.