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Remnant of prairie on Whidbey may sprout only houses
Monday, March 22, 1999
By REBEKAH DENN
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COUPEVILLE -- Steve Erickson was sure the rare prairie he mapped off a quiet dirt road here in 1997 would be safe from developers' bulldozers.
After all, the property was part of the Whidbey Island Game Farm, an 150-acre parcel of largely undeveloped land in a 17,000-acre national reserve.
But now the property, which is owned by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, may be headed for the auction block and residential development. The department has been selling land to help make up for a $17 million budget shortage that prompted layoffs and other turmoil at the state agency last year.
Pheasants and other game were once raised on the farm on Smith Prairie near Coupeville, but it is now little-used and is on the department's list of surplus properties.
The department already has sold about $1.4 million worth of its surplus lands, from an old hatchery east of Stanwood to an office building in Yakima. The farm is the last property of significant value on the list, according to Fish and Wildlife, and would bring the department to its $2 million land sales goal if sold at the appraised value of nearly $700,000.
The potential sale has alarmed environmental groups and ecologists who say the Smith Prairie land is irreplaceable and a sale would be irreparable and shortsighted.
"It already is in public hands, and I can't imagine why it shouldn't stay that way," said Steve Ellis, a board member and past president of the Whidbey Audubon Society. "We've got to keep these treasures while we have them."
Those who oppose the sale say the land is valuable on several fronts: as a rare ecosystem, one of the last two glacial outwash prairies in the region; as a haven for rarely seen flora and fauna; as an expanse of undeveloped open space on the fast-growing island; and as an integral part of the Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve, a collection of private and public lands identified as a U.S. "cultural landscape" and administrated by the National Park Service.
On a recent morning there, a hawk circled high above rodents hiding in a shrubby snowberry field on the property, while songbirds provided a constant background of cheeps and twitters. Leaves of camas, whose bulbs Native Americans dug for dietary starch, poked from the ground, and skinny blades of Idaho fescue grass gathered in clumps. Dried remnants of prairie goldenrod and dried yarrow and showy fleabane carpeted the lumpy fields.
Those wintry, stalky remnants are a piece of heaven, and will be transformed again when a head-turning riot of native flowers blooms later this spring.
Gretchen Luxenberg, a National Park Service historian and Ebey's Landing trust board member, said the property is a key parcel in the reserve.
"The trust board doesn't have any authority, nor does the National Park Service, to say this sale is not allowed," she said. "But in the spirit of the reserve being set aside by Congress for future generations, it would be a disaster."
Fish and Wildlife authorities said the department recognizes the property has public value, and that administrators would prefer to see it preserved as open space rather than developed. However, they said, its merits don't match the agency's state-mandated goals.
The department bought the old farm in the 1940s to raise game birds, primarily pheasants, but has consolidated those operations in recent years and has used Smith Prairie only for pheasant holding pens.
Dan Budd, real estate manager for Fish and Wildlife, said maintenance and other costs on the property are a financial drain, and that the department cannot justify spending scarce resources to preserve its open space and native plants unless they further the department's mission.
"Plant communities, in and of themselves, are not a Fish and Wildlife resource, necessarily," he said. "Where the department has the authority to acquire and hold land is where it is being used to promote the needs of fish and wildlife or fish-and-wildlife-related recreation."
Still, the department has supported a move to preserve the Smith Prairie land: A bill now moving through the Legislature would postpone the sale one year to give environmental groups time to raise money to buy it.
The bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Kelly Barlean, R-Langley, unanimously passed the House last week and is scheduled for a Senate committee hearing today.
"I think all of us would be extremely happy if we could sell it to a user or group of users that keeps it in its natural state in perpetuity," said Jay Larson, Puget Sound and coastal lands supervisor for Fish and Wildlife.
Beyond that, the Whidbey Environmental Action Network, which Erickson heads, sued Fish and Wildlife in Island County Superior Court last week.
The civil lawsuit challenged the agency's decision that the property did not warrant an environmental review under the State Environmental Protection Act.
Without such a review, Erickson said, the full scale of the property's value will not be known, including the question of whether the habitat holds rare butterflies and whether potential archaeological sites are located there.
The Fish and Wildlife proposal would divide the property into twelve roughly 10-acre parcels designed for residential development. Zoning would allow either 23 or 46 homes on the land depending how the property was used, Erickson said.
Fish and Wildlife would keep 30 acres for game-farm use -- the wood-and-wire pheasant holding pens are still intact and cover one edge of the property -- and would restrict development on a 10-acre parcel that includes the glacial prairie remnant. Opponents say the 10 acres is not enough to preserve the prairie area, with the state Native Plant Society recommending 100 acres at least.
Erickson, an ecological restoration specialist by trade, said he believes environmentalists can gather the money to buy the property over time, even though the value of the rough prairie isn't as romantically clear as that of a leaping salmon or spouting whale.
It's the only spot on Whidbey Island Erickson has found a particular species of lily, and it was a burst of dramatic "shooting star" flowers, previously unknown on the island, that first led him to the prairie in 1997.
Selling the land for a Fish and Wildlife budget shortage, he wrote the agency, "is like stuffing the last salmon and selling it as a wall ornament to raise money for fish conservation."
"A budget shortfall is not a good reason to toy with the extinction of a vanishingly rare native ecosystem."
These state Department of Fish and Wildlife properties were deemed surplus and sold in recent months to help make up for a budget shortage.
Source: Department of Fish and Wildlife.
P-I reporter Rebekah Denn can be reached at 425-774-6625 or rebekahdenn@seattle-pi.com
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER 
Steve Erickson walks in the state-owned prairie on Whidbey Island. He wants to save it from development.
Scott Eklund/P-I State properties that have been sold
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