Daily Star’s investigative reporting on Benson housing development gets kudos from Rachel Maddow

A U.S. Interior Department attorney met twice with then-Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt the same day she allegedly told a Fish and Wildlife Service official to back off his tough stance on a huge Benson development.

The two meetings, shown on Bernhardt’s calendar, have intensified concerns of Trump administration critics that Bernhardt personally ordered the attorney to exert political pressure to reverse an environmental decision.

Moreover, the meetings came 13 days after the developer of the Benson project, Mike Ingram, a prominent political donor to President Trump, held a private meeting with Bernhardt to talk about the 28,000-home Villages at Vigneto.

Bernhardt, a Trump appointee, and associate interior solicitor Peg Romanik held one meeting before and one right around the time the Fish and Wildlife supervisor, Steve Spangle, has said Romanik called him on Aug. 31, 2017.

Spangle has said Romanik told him “a high-level political appointee” in Interior wanted him to reverse his requirement for a major environmental analysis of the Villages at Vigneto.

Bernhardt and Romanik met from 8:30 to 9 a.m. and from 1:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. Washington, D.C., time that day, Bernhardt’s calendar shows. The second Bernhardt-Romanik meeting was also attended by Richard Goeken, Interior’s deputy solicitor for parks and wildlife, who oversees legal issues involving the Fish and Wildlife Service, the calendar shows.

Spangle got his call from Romanik in midmorning that day, he told the Star. He has said it was the first time he ever received political pressure from higher-ups in his long career at Fish and Wildlife under five presidential administrations.

An Interior spokeswoman hasn’t returned emails this week from the Star seeking comment on the meetings.

Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for energy and mining companies, including the company proposing the Rosemont Mine near Tucson, has since been named by President Trump as Interior secretary.

Spangle said that learning this week about the two Romanik-Bernhardt meetings adds to his previous suspicion that Bernhardt directed the attorney to call him.

“It’s another piece of circumstantial evidence,” Spangle said.

Spangle has said he gave in to the pressure and eased the way for Vigneto. “I knew that this was the (Trump) administration’s position, and since I worked for the administration, I had a job to do,” he previously told the Star. A few months after the Romanik call, he opted to take early retirement.

The Interior Department has previously denied putting any pressure on Spangle.

Romanik has not returned several calls this week seeking comment. She declined to discuss the case with the Star at the time Spangle first alleged political interference in this case to the Star in spring 2019.

The timing of the two Bernhardt-Romanik meetings is “incredibly suspicious, given what Mr. Spangle has said about the call that he got from Peg Romanik,” said Aaron Weiss, a conservationist who directs the Denver-based Center for Western Priorities. Weiss told the Star this week about the two meetings on Bernhardt’s calendar.

Weiss said he also finds it suspicious that Bernhardt and Romanik met again on Oct. 6, 2017. It was the same day that Ingram, CEO of Vigneto developer El Dorado Holdings, gave a $10,000 donation to a fundraising arm of the Trump campaign.

The timing of that meeting and the donation may have been coincidental, Weiss acknowledged. But there’s no way to know what the two were meeting about either day, he noted, because Bernhardt’s official daily calendar doesn’t disclose the subject of his meetings with various people and groups.

That donation was later refunded, Lanny Davis, an attorney for El Dorado Holdings, told the Associated Press Wednesday. Davis said Ingram got a refund so he could donate instead to a political action committee that allows contributors to give more money than campaigns do.

Ingram had donated $50,900 to President Trump’s political committees since 2015, CNN reported.

CNN reported this week, and the Star confirmed, that Bernhardt held what CNN termed a secret meeting with Ingram in Billings, Montana on Aug. 18, 2017, 13 days before Romanik’s call to Spangle. That meeting, unlike four others the developer and assistant secretary have had, wasn’t on Bernhardt’s official calendar.

CNN’s story reported on Bernhardt’s first Aug. 31, 2017, meeting with Romanik, but not the second.

Last week, U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Tucson Democrat, wrote to Bernhardt to question him about these issues.

Grijalva noted that Ingram’s $10,000 donation came only three weeks before Spangle wrote to the Army Corps of Engineers on Oct. 26, 2017, that he no longer thought Vigneto needed a full-scale environmental analysis.

That letter reversed Spangle’s position a year earlier, in an October 2016 letter to the Corps, that groundwater pumping for Vigneto was likely to reduce the San Pedro River’s flow, in stretches designated as federal critical habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher and proposed as critical habitat for two threatened species.

Grijalva, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, launched an investigation of the Vigneto case following the Star’s April article in which Spangle first said he was “rolled” by superiors over Vigneto.

He wrote that recent reports about Spangle’s comments have raised questions about whether “a key permit decision at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was inappropriately reversed.”

“It’s not clear to me why top Interior officials would weigh in on a local land development unless someone was being done a huge favor,” Grijalva told the Associated Press Wednesday.

Grijalva asked that the Interior Department provide him “all documents and communications to, from or within” its Solicitor’s Office regarding Vigneto from Oct. 1, 2016 to Oct. 31, 2017. He gave a deadline of July 29.

Interior Press Secretary Molly Block said “the department will respond through the proper channels.”

Davis, a prominent Washington, D.C., attorney representing El Dorado, has said that Spangle’s final letter on Vigneto saying a major environmental analysis wasn’t warranted was the right decision, based on the case’s science and facts.

He noted that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Arizona office reaffirmed the validity of Spangle’s final decision in a June 2019 letter to the Corps.

Davis has criticized as “innuendo” comments raising concerns about Bernhardt’s and Ingram’s meeting and Interior’s reversal on the case. The Aug. 18 meeting in Billings occurred simply because the two happened to be in Montana at the same time, an El Dorado spokesman said.

The deputy Interior secretary held a secret meeting with the developer of a big Benson subdivision two weeks before a federal underling says he was pressured to reverse his tough stance on the project, CNN reports.

The breakfast meeting was held in August 2017 between then-deputy secretary David Bernhardt, who is now Interior secretary, and Mike Ingram, CEO of Phoenix-based El Dorado Holdings, which proposes to build the 28,000-home Villages at Vigneto in Benson.

The meeting was the first of five between Bernhardt and Ingram during the Trump administration, CNN reported Monday.

The cable network said this was “a secret meeting, not on any public calendar.” It also reported Ingram had donated $50,900 to President Trump’s political committees since 2015.

The report came as U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, was requesting a host of documents from the Department of Interior and an Interior agency, the Bureau of Land Management, about their handling of the development.

Grijalva is investigating because of allegations first made to the Arizona Daily Star in March by whistleblower Steve Spangle.

Spangle said that in August 2017, when he was a Fish and Wildlife supervisor, Interior officials pressured him to reverse his stance that the development needed more study because its groundwater pumping could dry up the neighboring San Pedro River. Spangle said he complied and then retired.

An El Dorado spokesman confirmed the August 2017 meeting between Bernhardt and Ingram, saying it was held at a restaurant in Billings, Montana, although CNN said it was at Ingram’s hunting lodge in Billings.

Ingram was only asking that the Interior Department make its decision on Vigneto on the facts of the case, El Dorado attorney Lanny Davis said.

Davis told CNN that any implication his client exerted improper influence over Interior officials was “strictly innuendo.”

“There is not a single fact that supports the false premise that political lobbying or influence caused a change in environmental policy positions regarding the development of the Villages,” Davis said Tuesday.

He noted that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Arizona office just this summer reaffirmed Spangle’s revised position that the project didn’t need a full-scale environmental analysis.

Environmentalists blasted Davis’ statements.

“It’s not innuendo. It’s a very specific series of events that reeks not just of improper political interference, but outright pay-for-play corruption,” said Aaron Weiss, director of the environmental group Center for Western Priorities, via Twitter on Tuesday.

Robin Silver, conservation chair for the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, said Vigneto is a case where “another one of Trump’s rich friends has access, obviously makes donations and gets a result that otherwise never would have happened.”

Grijalva, a Tucson Democrat, is seeking information relating to Spangle’s allegation that he agreed to back off his push for a sweeping environmental analysis of the Vigneto project.

Spangle said he did so after he was told in August 2017 by an attorney in the Interior’s Solicitor’s Office that a high-level Interior political appointee wanted him to back off. The attorney, Peg Romanik, has declined to comment.

Spangle has said he always suspected it was Bernhardt who applied the pressure. “He was the most high-level political appointee in Interior and there aren’t many political appointees there,” Spangle said.

Grijalva is also trying to get information from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management on why it hasn’t spoken out on Vigneto’s possible effects on the neighboring San Pedro Riparian Conservation Area. BLM owns the conservation area, which includes the St. David Cienega near Benson.

Grijalva sent letters to Bernhardt and acting BLM Director Brian Steed on July 3.

Trump named Bernhardt to replace Ryan Zinke as Interior secretary in April 2019. CNN also reported that Ingram had one meeting with Zinke and two meetings and three email exchanges with former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

An El Dorado spokesman told the Star on Tuesday that company officials don’t know where CNN came up with these 11 “interactions” between Ingram and Trump administration officials. But they likely include interactions having nothing to do with the Villages of Vigneto, such as Ingram’s work on the International Wildlife Conservation Council, the spokesman said.

Ingram’s only meeting with an Interior official on this project was that Billings breakfast meeting, said the company spokesman.

Spangle’s reversal helped speed an Army Corps of Engineers decision in October 2018 to reinstate the project’s then-suspended Clean Water Act permit. The detailed environmental analysis Spangle had previously ordered would have taken many months or longer. Since then, the Corps has suspended the permit a second time and is now considering reinstating it in the face of an environmentalist lawsuit.

The Corps has said the review Spangle wanted is outside the proper scope of analysis for its decision-making on the project. That’s in part because El Dorado has said it could build a development, although a different kind, on the 12,000-acre site even if it didn’t have a federal permit for one, the Corps has said.

Specifically, Grijalva, who had already told the Star his committee is investigating this case, is seeking:

• From Interior, copies of “all documents and communications to, from and within” the agency’s Solicitor’s office regarding Vigneto, between Oct. 1, 2016 and Oct. 31, 2017.
• From BLM, copies of “all documents and communications” relating to BLM’s consideration of Vigneto’s impacts on the national conservation area.
• Copies of all documents and other communications on Vigneto that BLM sent to the Army Corps. He requested these documents by no later than July 29.

Interior Press Secretary Molly Block said in an email to the Star that, “We have received the letters and will respond through the proper channels.” Block also noted that Steed, the acting BLM director, no longer works for Interior.

A BLM spokesman emailed the Star on Tuesday that the agency “will be responsive to Rep. Grijalva’s request. We are still in the process of seeing if we have responsive documents.”

Reinstatement of a Phoenix developer’s permit to build a 28,000-home project in Benson is likely now that federal agencies have stood by an earlier decision limiting its environmental reviews, say attorneys on both sides of the case.

Last week, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official Jeff Humphrey wrote a letter saying the service’s Arizona field office sees no reason to change its 2017 stance that the development is unlikely to adversely affect three endangered and threatened species living near the project site — or their designated critical habitat.

In a related matter, the wildlife service’s parent, the Interior Department, this week let the Arizona Daily Star know that it’s keeping its internal communications involving the 2017 Villages of Vigneto decision under wraps. The Star had requested them through the federal Freedom of Information Act. The Interior’s Solicitor’s office released 41 pages of documents to the Star, but those containing substantive information were almost totally blacked out under a commonly used FOIA exemption.

Humphrey, field supervisor for the service’s Arizona Ecological Services office, wrote the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is considering whether to reinstate a 2006 permit for the project that has been suspended since February.

Since the Corps has reached a similar conclusion recently, attorneys Lanny Davis for the developer and Stu Gillespie for environmentalists agreed that it’s likely the project’s federal Clean Water Act permit will be reinstated, possibly soon. Corps spokesman Dave Palmer declined to comment on the case, because it’s in litigation.

Humphrey said the service’s review of the case was triggered by a request to do so from the Corps. That request followed recent allegations by his predecessor, Steve Spangle, that back in 2017 Spangle was successfully pressured by higher-ups in the Interior Department to reverse his earlier, tougher stance on the project.

Spangle had previously argued that the Vigneto project needed a wide-ranging environmental review because it had the potential to negatively affect endangered species and their critical habitat. He was concerned that its groundwater pumping would dry up sections of the neighboring San Pedro River. Such a review would have taken a much longer wait time for a development that’s now been hold for 13 years.

But Spangle told the Star in an interview that he had been told by a friend in the department that it was in his interest politically to back down.

Humphrey’s June 12 letter followed what he called an internal review conducted by the wildlife service’s Arizona Ecological Services office in Phoenix. Because of Spangle’s allegation of political pressure, the Arizona office didn’t consult with officials in its Albuquerque regional office or in Washington, D.C,, Humphrey said.

Saying, “We take the allegations made by Mr. Spangle seriously,” Humphrey wrote that his allegations still don’t change the service’s earlier conclusion, reached in October 2017.

“Our decision is based only upon facts contained in the records supporting” the that earlier decision, Humphrey wrote.

Humphrey’s letter offered no detail to explain his decision. In an interview, he said he can’t comment further, due to a formal notice of intent to sue the wildlife service and the Corps on this issue filed by environmentalist opponents months ago.

But Humphrey’s letter alluded to past statements from the Corps and the developer that El Dorado could build Vigneto even without a Clean Water Act permit, as a factor in the service’s October 2017 decision.

Humphrey’s letter came as “a complete surprise” to Davis and others representing Vigneto, Davis told the Star this week.

“I completely respect Mr. Spangle’s feelings and any pressure from Washington to Mr. Spangle, if it occurred, as he said it did, I think it was and is completely inappropriate,” Davis said. “It doesn’t matter to me who it was. It was completely inappropriate.”

He said he’s glad that the Arizona wildlife service office took Spangle’s concerns seriously — “They took a brand new look at the issue of endangered species that might be affected by the project. And they ended up, independently of anything from Washington, and confirmed with what Mr. Spangle ended up with — that there were no likely adverse effects on endangered species,” Davis said.

“In other words, FWS took Mr. Spangle’s concerns seriously, with no influence from Washington at all,” Davis said.

Previously, Davis had acknowledged that El Dorado CEO Mike Ingram had telephoned then-Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt back in 2017 to raise his concerns about Spangle’s earlier opinion. But Davis said that all Ingram had wanted was for Bernhardt to properly consider “the facts and the law” in the case. Bernhardt is now Interior secretary.

Gillespie called Humphrey’s letter a tremendous setback for Arizona and the San Pedro’s future.

“The FWS’ letter is also a textbook example of an arbitrary decision. The FWS did not undertake any additional analysis of the facts or the law,” Gillespie said.

“It blindly deferred to the Corps and simply assumed that ‘Vigneto is feasible with or without a Clean Water Act 404 Permit,’” Gillespie said.

“But that assumption is contradicted by the record, including El Dorado’s own statements confirming its need for a permit,” to build Vigneto as it planned, Gillespie said.

The developer has said it would build a different kind of project, with different road corridors and delays in some of its housing, if it didn’t get the permit. Attorney Davis has said he doesn’t believe that issue was a factor in the agencies’ decision not to require the broader environmental review.

“In fact, Mr. Spangle rejected El Dorado’s bald assertion that it would build Vigneto without a permit,” Gillespie said. “Mr. Humphrey provides no basis for reaching a different conclusion, other than his rote incantation of the company line.”

Spangle told the Star he was comfortable with the wildlife service’s latest action although he disagrees with it.

“The FWS is in a position (of) not having on-staff expertise to refute the Corps’ determination. They have no staff expertise to evaluate the engineering, financial, or other technical aspects of project viability, so are unable to challenge the Corps’ determination,” Spangle said.

At the same time, the service, asked to evaluate an action, is required to evaluate direct and indirect effects, Spangle said.

“If a developer applies for a permit, it’s reasonable to assume it’s because it needs one. FWS should simply evaluate the action’s effects whether there’s a Plan B or not,” he said.

The Vigneto permit has been on hold since February, when the Army Corps suspended it for review after environmentalists had filed a lawsuit to overturn the Corps’ October 2018 decision to reinstate the permit. Since the Corps first issued the permit in 2006, it has suspended the permit twice and reinstated it once.

In May, the Corps wrote Humphrey saying it saw no reason to change its original conclusion, but wanted to know, “out of an abundance of caution,” whether Spangle’s comments had changed the service’s position.

In the end, whether the 28,000-home Villages at Vigneto will be greenlighted for development may depend on how the courts deal with two key points.

These points have dominated recent debate on the 12,300-acre project in Benson:

• First, Vigneto’s developers say they don’t need a federal Clean Water Act permit to develop the site. They say they could and will build the project in a different fashion if they don’t get the permit.
• Second, they want the permit anyway.

Those facts are among several reasons why the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has limited how thoroughly it analyzes the project’s impacts.

So far, that’s meant that the development’s impacts on the San Pedro River aren’t being studied, although that’s the issue the project’s critics are most concerned about.

Being told that Vigneto could build a project without a permit also triggered then-Fish and Wildlife Service official Steve Spangle’s abrupt 2017 reversal of his previous position favoring a full-fledged review of the project.

Spangle originally wanted to analyze the effects of developing all 12,324 acres of the property but backtracked to 1,775 acres.

If a private project can proceed independent of federal action, there’s not enough justification for the federal government to analyze the entire project’s impacts, the chief of the Corps’ Arizona branch, Sally Diebolt, wrote to Spangle in 2017.

“The Corps’ federal control and responsibility are often, as in this case, limited,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, Vigneto’s clean-water permit is still pending — and its status has flipped back and forth for years.

The permit was granted by the Corps in 2006 but is now undergoing its third round of reviews by the agency. The Corps has approved the permit once, been sued over it twice, suspended it twice and reinstated it once. It was most recently suspended in February 2019.

Five conservation groups filed suit challenging the Corps’ recent reinstatement of the original, 2006 permit in October. They have made the Corps’ limits on its analysis, and the developer’s claim it could build without the permit, key issues in the lawsuit.

They see the developer’s desire for a permit that it says it doesn’t need as a major inconsistency. While Vigneto officials deny that they've formally applied for a permit--since they consider the 2006 permit still valid--they have openly pushed to have the suspensions lifted.

Today, the now-retired Spangle says the developer’s position “doesn’t pass the smell test.”

“They wanted their development full-blown as they planned it. They also wanted to say they could still build it without a permit. That to me is having it both ways,” said Spangle, who has alleged that Interior Department higher-ups pressured him to reverse his decision.

“It’s disingenuous to me to submit a project for analysis, then to say you should only do the analysis a little bit,” he said.

Three law professors with experience in researching Clean Water Act permitting disagreed in interviews with the Corps’ position that the development doesn’t need a full-blown environmental analysis. They are not involved in the Vigneto issue themselves.

The Corps is mum on these issues, saying it can’t comment on issues in litigation.

It did, however, send the wildlife service a letter on May 23 saying it’s sticking by its original conclusion that the project isn’t likely to affect endangered and threatened species.

Vigneto’s developer, Scottsdale-based El Dorado Holdings Inc., says it’s not trying to have it both ways.

For one, it wants the permit — which allows for the filling of 51 acres of washes — because that will allow development “in the most environmentally sensitive method the company could have possibly chosen,” one best for the quality of life, said Lanny Davis. He’s a prominent Washington, D.C., attorney representing El Dorado as a lawyer and media spokesman.

If El Dorado doesn’t get the permit, it still plans to develop the land in a different fashion — one it says will be less environmentally sensitive but still technically and economically feasible.

“We only want it one way — the 2006 permit way which is best for the environment,” said Davis, adding that El Dorado's position is that the 2006 permit remains valid.

Davis also noted that the Corps wrote a May 2017 letter to Spangle that offered several, clearly independent legal grounds — regardless of El Dorado’s position that it can build a project without a permit — to justify its decision that limiting its scope of analysis is “legally correct on the facts and the law.”

It first made that judgment in 2006 and confirmed it in 2017, Davis noted.

The Army Corps would have limited the scope of its analysis, based on the facts and the law, even if the developer couldn’t have built the Vigneto project without a Clean Water Act permit, Davis said.

Environmentalists disagree on that point, meaning the courts will have to decide who’s correct.

What could be built without permit

The Army Corps laid out what El Dorado could build without a permit in its biological evaluation of Vigneto in May 2017.

The agency had to discuss this alternative project because under federal law, the Corps can’t approve a permit to discharge fill material into federally regulated washes unless no reasonable alternative exists.

The project site has plenty of room for the development without touching washes, the Corps said. But to avoid them, the project’s total acreage would have to be expanded.

Plus, a no-permit project’s roads would mostly or totally tie into Arizona 90, running east-west, while the permitted project’s roads would run mostly north-south. The no-permit project would add greatly to the highway’s traffic load, increasing congestion and air pollution, in contrast with a project built under a permit, Vigneto developers say.

Also, the project would have to scrap plans to build “roundabouts” at six intersections at Arizona 90 — aimed at reducing traffic disruption — in favor of traffic lights, requiring frequent stops.

Bridges could be built over federally regulated washes without a permit — but to avoid damaging washes, the spans would have to be longer and more expensive, reducing their number, the Corps said.

That would limit how well neighborhoods were physically connected, eating into Vigneto’s vision of a cohesive community. Plans for an integrated network of paths and trails also would be curtailed.

The alternative project would also have less open space, and because it would build out more slowly, would also have less ability to quickly put effluent onto its golf courses, increasing groundwater use, the Corps said.

“Admittedly, developing our property in this matter would not meet the project purpose, and will be less efficient from a land planning standpoint. Our core concept of interconnected villages will be difficult to retain,” El Dorado President Jim Kenny wrote to the Corps in September 2017.

“Nevertheless, the development is feasible from an engineering and land planning perspective,” Kenny wrote.

If the permit is denied, “El Dorado will develop the site in this fashion, rather than sitting on its investment and earning no return.”

Robin Silver, an environmentalist opposed to Vigneto, said that if the project had to proceed without a federal permit, it would be gridlocked because it would flood Arizona 90 with more cars and trucks than it could accommodate.

Citing the developer’s own Vigneto transportation plan, he said it shows that Arizona 90 is currently carrying a little less than one-third the vehicles it’s designed to carry. But if all of Vigneto’s traffic had to use that highway to enter and leave the development, its traffic load would jump to far above the road’s capacity, said Silver, conservation chair for the Center for Biological Diversity.

“I can’t imagine any community approving those kind of plans,” Silver said.

“Doesn’t get the Corps off the hook”

In a memo and in a letter to the wildlife service in May 2017, the Corps listed the alternative project as one of several reasons for turning down the service’s desire for a sweeping analysis of Vigneto.

But if the developer could build its preferred project without the permit, it wouldn’t want one, said Robin Craig, a University of Utah law professor who has written a book on the Clean Water Act.

The fact that the developer is applying for one and wants to grade the washes suggests that the full requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act apply, Craig added. That involves looking at the entire project’s cumulative impacts, she said.

The developer’s ability to build another project without touching washes “doesn’t get the Corps off the hook” from having to analyze all impacts, Craig said.

If there is no way to build the project without affecting the washes, the federal government has to apply all relevant legal and regulatory standards to it, said Georgetown University law professor Bill Buzbee.

That would include a “public interest review” of relevant issues such as the potential for water shortages or the damage to riparian vegetation from the project’s water use, Buzbee said.

“There’s no such thing as an exemption (from a thorough review of project impacts) because a company could design their project around a regulation,” Buzbee said. “That makes no sense.”

“Two-faced analysis”

Making this issue trickier is that when the Corps reinstated Vigneto’s original, 2006 Clean Water Act permit last October (it’s now suspended again), the agency said the alternative plan isn’t “practicable.”

That’s a legal term, meaning the alternative may be economically, logistically and technically feasible, but doesn’t meet the project’s purpose of a cohesive community. So the agency couldn’t use the alternative project as a reason to revoke the 2006 permit.

That puts the Corps in what an attorney for opponents and a law professor say is a contradictory legal position, by using the alternative project as one factor justifying its limit on an environmental analysis, while saying that project is legally unacceptable as an alternative.

“They’re trying to have their cake and eat it, too,” said Stu Gillespie, an attorney for the environmental groups suing over Vigneto. “It’s a total two-faced analysis.”

The Corps’ position does seem inconsistent, said University of Alabama law professor William Andreen. Once it’s rejected an alternative as impractical, the Corps can’t use that alternative as an excuse to not analyze the entire project that it does accept, he said.

“They have to identify all direct and indirect impacts of the preferred alternative,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva says he’ll investigate a longtime federal official’s allegations that he was pressured politically to reverse a key decision on a 28,000-home Benson subdivision to smooth the way for its permitting.

Steve Spangle said he was pressured in 2017, when he was a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official, to reverse his earlier biological decision that broad study was needed of the proposed Villages at Vigneto development’s impacts on endangered species and the San Pedro River. Spangle, now retired, made the claims in an Arizona Daily Star interview published April 28.

As chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Grijalva, a Tucson Democrat, has the power to call witnesses in an investigation.

Meanwhile, an attorney for Vigneto’s developer, El Dorado Holdings Inc., confirmed Friday that the company’s CEO called then-Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt in 2017 to raise concerns after Spangle made his initial decision. Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for oil and mining interests, including the Rosemont Mine near Tucson, now heads Interior, by appointment of President Trump this year.

The attorney, Lanny Davis, said El Dorado CEO Mike Ingram’s action was not political and was “solely based on the merits and facts of the law, which turned out to be on the side of the company, on the ... (final) decision made by Mr. Spangle and the Army Corps.” (After Spangle’s reversal, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers granted Vigneto the Clean Water Act permit it needed to begin construction.)

Spangle said Friday the fact that Ingram called Bernhardt, which was first reported by The Arizona Republic on May 4 in a follow-up to the Star’s article, “solidifies my original belief” this was an act of political pressure.

“It confirms what I suspected all along, that somebody was asked to intervene. The whole thing smacked of non-biological decision-making,” said Spangle, who was the top Fish and Wildlife official in Arizona from 2003-2018.

Spangle told the Star he didn’t know who ultimately applied the pressure. He said he was told by an attorney in the Interior Department’s Solicitors Office that she received a phone call from a higher-up to tell him to change his stance if he knew what was good for him. Spangle declined to name the attorney.

He said the political pressure was the first he ever experienced in 34 years with the federal government, including 29 years with the wildlife service under five presidents going back to President George H.W. Bush.

Grijalva said environmentalists had suspected Spangle’s reversal was prompted by political pressure.

“The fact that he says it just validates that, particularly what I think is the context of the Trump administration and the Interior Department — this is their agenda, rolling back the protections in place,” Grijalva said.

“This is par for the course — I’m glad we have him, it’s confirmation of what the reality is,” Grijalva said of Spangle’s recent comments to the Star that he got “rolled” by a Trump administration official over Vigneto.

Interior and the Army Corps declined through their spokesmen to comment on Grijalva’s intention to investigate the case.

The Interior Department didn’t respond to a question from the Star about whether Bernhardt played a role leading to Spangle’s reversal. The department has already denied that its Solicitor’s Office sought to pressure Spangle.

Spangle’s earlier decision would have required the Army Corps to conduct a broad analysis of the environmental impacts of the entire 12,300-acre Vigneto development.

In addition to Ingram’s call to Bernhardt, El Dorado’s president, Jim Kenny, wrote the Army Corps a letter in 2017 that led directly to a letter from the Corps to Spangle asking him to reverse his earlier decision. That letter is in the public record.

Davis, the Washington, D.C.-based attorney for El Dorado, said the company will fully cooperate with an investigation and provide Grijalva and his committee staff all the information they request.

He said he believes an investigation will validate the company’s view that the Army Corps and Spangle correctly limited the scope of the project’s environmental review.

Asked if he thought Ingram’s call to Bernhardt influenced how the Interior Department handled the case, Davis said, “I hope so, based on the facts and the law. That’s the only thing that matters to a judge. It’s going to be decided by a judge.”

Environmentalists have sued to overturn the permit issued by the Army Corps, and the permit is currently suspended.

Davis, who is handling both legal and public-relations work for El Dorado, is a veteran D.C. attorney and public-relations executive. His recent clients include former presidential attorney and alleged Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen.

Spangle’s “pure innuendo to a journalist that he ‘felt’ political pressure from anonymous sources in Washington causing him to change his mind is just that,” El Dorado Holdings said in a statement.

“He supplies no names, facts, or legal issues as evidence that his final decision was the wrong decision, regardless of his ‘feelings.’”

Grijalva said he hopes to “revisit some of those decisions that have been made” by the Corps, including Vigneto and the agency’s March 2019 approval of a Clean Water Act permit for the planned Rosemont Mine in the Santa Rita Mountains southeast of Tucson.

While the Vigneto and Rosemont decisions have some common threads — both centered heavily on the Corps’ moves to limit how broadly it analyzed their environmental impacts — they will be investigated separately, Grijalva said.

By interviewing the parties and agencies involved in the Vigneto case, Grijalva said he hopes for a successful lawsuit against the project or to force a “start over on the regulations that they (federal agencies) changed, to get the decision redone properly.”

Spangle said that since the Star’s article was published, he has already been interviewed by the Natural Resources Committee staff about the case.

“I’ll do whatever is asked” regarding a congressional investigation, he said.

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

In response to Spangle’s allegation, the Interior Department issued a statement Friday explaining and defending the wildlife service’s policy switch on Vigneto.

Asked if the department’s Solicitor’s Office put pressure on Spangle to reverse his stance, a spokesman issued a one-word denial: “No.”

The reversal occurred simply because the service got additional information about the project from the Corps and the developer, the Interior spokesman said.

Concerns about San PeDro impacts

At issue is a 12,324-acre project whose homes, golf course, resort and commercial and office development would flank both sides of Arizona 90, 2 miles south of Interstate 10 and 4 miles southwest of downtown Benson.

The project’s Phoenix-based developer, El Dorado Holdings Inc., has said Vigneto is inspired by the Tuscany hill country of Italy in its “impressive array of cultural, social and recreational amenities and natural landscape.”

El Dorado has promoted Vigneto as a self-sufficient development, with schools, a large trail network, bars, restaurants, shops, banks, day care centers and the like, as well as homes.

Environmentalists have fought the project for four years, mainly out of concern that its groundwater pumping will dry up parts of the San Pedro River, including the nearby St. David Cienega.

The cienega is the only marshland left in the river’s federally protected conservation area, running 40 miles south from Benson. The river lies 4 miles east of the Vigneto site.

Spangle himself has long expressed concerns about the project’s impacts on the San Pedro. He shared the concerns in letters to the Corps dating back to 2004.

But in his decision reversal in 2017, he tempered that view, saying, “Our concerns remain, but the legal situation required us to retract that position” that Vigneto’s impacts must be thoroughly analyzed before the permit was granted.

The Corps issued the Vigneto permit in November 2018. In February, however, it suspended the permit for additional review, less than two weeks after a second lawsuit was filed against the Corps over its permitting for the project.

By then, Spangle was retired, having taken a buyout from the wildlife service on March 31, 2018.

First such pressure in his career

Spangle’s recent comments to the Star amount to a rare public complaint by a federal official of political intervention into an endangered species case.

He said he wasn’t ordered to reverse his decision. But he was told “a couple weeks” before writing his October 2017 letter, by the Solicitor’s Office, that if he knew what was good for him politically at his job, he would do it, he said.

“I was told by an attorney there that a high-level politico in the Department of Interior had told the attorney to call me and said that, ‘Spangle is out to lunch and needs to rescind the call,’” Spangle said.

“I received a call from Washington that that’s the wrong call,” Spangle added, referring to his earlier decision on Vigneto.

He said he didn’t know or ask who the high-level Interior figure was, and that he would not release the name of the Solicitor’s Office attorney who called him to get the decision reversed.

“She is a friend” and Spangle doesn’t want to get her in political hot water, he told the Star.

“She was strongly encouraged to call me and point out the error of my ways,” Spangle said of the attorney. “My job is that I work for the administration. The administration’s position takes precedence over mine.”

But the pressure he got to reverse his decision was the first he ever experienced in 34 years with the federal government, Spangle said. That included 29 years with the wildlife service under five presidents going back to President George H.W. Bush.

In his last 15 years with the service, Spangle was field supervisor of its Arizona Ecological Services office, based in Phoenix. There, he had decision-making authority over most endangered species issues handled by the service in this state.

The pressure exerted about Vigneto contributed to Spangle’s decision to retire, he said.

“I know how the system works. I wasn’t used to this particular political atmosphere that struck me as fairly foreboding if I was to stay on the job,” said Spangle, who turned 65 last November. “So when the buyout offer came, all signs were pointing to the decision to retire.”

Spangle cited risks to imperiled species

Spangle’s comments have their roots in a tangled case of controversy and litigation dating back more than a decade.

The Corps had granted the project, then under a different owner and called Whetstone Ranch, a Clean Water Act permit in 2006 to build on about 8,000 of the 12,324 acres now planned for the development. But the project stalled for most of the next decade due to the Southwest’s real estate crash.

El Dorado Holdings resurrected the project in 2015 after buying the land from the previous owner, and named it Villages at Vigneto.

Before construction could begin, the Corps suspended the permit in July 2016 after being sued by environmentalists over its failure to consult with the wildlife service on the project’s impacts on endangered species.

In October 2016, Spangle wrote to the Corps that the service didn’t agree with the Corps’ conclusion that the massive project wouldn’t harm the Western yellow-billed cuckoo and the Northern Mexican garter snake, both threatened species, or their proposed critical habitat.

Discussing the entire, 12,324-acre site, Spangle wrote that “direct and indirect effects to threatened and endangered species, including proposed and final critical habitat, are reasonably certain to occur.”

For example, it’s likely that pumping of “an appreciable volume of groundwater” for the development will reduce flow in sections of the San Pedro River that already are designated as critical habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher and are proposed critical habitat for the garter snake and cuckoo, Spangle wrote.

Plus, because Vigneto’s size is much larger than what the Corps permitted in 2006.

“We are concerned that the (project) will be implemented in a piecemeal manner that does not include analyses of its full environmental impact,” Spangle told the Corps.

Before the wildlife service could begin its own review of the project, it needed the Corps to do a full-scale biological assessment of the development and its mitigation efforts, he said.

That letter was his third in 13 years to the Corps raising concerns about the project.

In July 2004, Spangle wrote that service officials “are particularly concerned about potential effects to the ecosystems of the San Pedro River, which support a diverse array of fish and wildlife resources, including threatened and endangered species.”

In July 2015, Spangle laid out detailed concerns about Vigneto’s potential impacts to the cuckoo and the garter snake, and asked the Corps to re-evaluate its 2006 permit decision. He also urged the Corps to start a formal review of the endangered species impacts.

Again, he cited potential threats to the river, in areas downstream of Benson, due to groundwater pumping for the project lowering the water table directly connected to the river.

Interior says broad analysis wasn’t needed

But in his October 2017 reversal letter, Spangle wrote that the Corps now could substantially limit its scope of analysis.

It would only have to examine the impacts of the project’s discharge of fill material into 51 acres of washes on site, and the preservation of more than 1,600 acres on and off site to compensate for the discharge work.

Spangle was told to make the switch based on statements by the developer and the Corps that the project could be built whether the permit was issued or not, he told the Star in the recent interview.

Just a month before Spangle wrote his letter, developer El Dorado Partners had told the Corps that it was technically feasible to develop the site without a permit, and that it intended to do that if necessary.

A May 2017 Corps report had reached the same conclusion, Spangle wrote in his October letter.

That meant a full-scale review of the entire project wasn’t legally needed, Spangle wrote. He wrote that he now also agreed with the Corps that Vigneto’s activities, authorized by the permit, weren’t likely to harm the cuckoo, garter snake or the flycatcher, or damage their critical habitat.

In the Interior Department’s statement Friday to the Star, a spokesman repeated the details of the September 2017 letter from El Dorado.

The spokesman noted that originally, the Corps had only sought the wildlife service’s comments on the impacts of the project’s mitigation efforts. But the service’s position was that the mitigation work was directly related to the entire development.

Because the permit wasn’t needed for the development itself, the development could no longer be considered related to the mitigation work. That removed the need for analyzing the entire project, the Interior spokesman said.

Why pursue “unnecessary” permit?

At the time, environmentalists with the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity and other groups were outraged at Spangle’s reversal.

They asked: If the Clean Water Act permit wasn’t needed for Vigneto to be built, why was El Dorado Holdings applying for it?

El Dorado spokesman Mike Reinbold didn’t respond to questions from the Star back then about why it was pursuing the permit if it wasn’t required for Vigneto to move forward.

“Let me ask you a question: What does it matter?” Reinbold said in a fall 2017 interview.

In Spangle’s recent interview, he told the Star the critics’ question about why El Dorado bothered to apply for the permit if it didn’t need it “is exactly the question I have. If it’s just as feasible to build without a permit, why did they even subject themselves to the process?”

“Anti-environment administration”

Spangle’s reversal under pressure on Vigneto was one of many things he didn’t like about the direction the Interior Department was taking in the Trump administration, which was nine months old at the time, he said.

“I saw policies in place or on the way that would be detrimental to national parks, the BLM and the Fish and Wildlife Service,” Spangle said.

“The Trump Administration is different from past Republican administrations — much more anti-regulatory and much more anti-environment … plain and simple, anti-environment.

“I miss the days of George W. Bush and Barack Obama and every other president,” he said.

He cited the Trump administration’s size reductions of national monuments declared under Obama, and its loosening of restrictions on oil drilling on public lands, as decisions he particularly didn’t like.

He also cited the administration’s reversal of a longstanding policy to prosecute oil and mining companies and others under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for inadvertent killings of birds that land in their pits and die.

Said Spangle: “The whole direction the Department of Interior was going in was absolutely the opposite direction of where I thought it should be.”

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt was directly involved in a federal decision to overturn another official’s insistence on a thorough analysis of a 28,000-home Benson project’s impact on the imperiled San Pedro River, a court document shows.

In August 2017, when Bernhardt was deputy interior secretary, he met secretly with a top official of El Dorado Holdings, the developer of the planned Villages at Vigneto, says the Justice Department document.

The meeting was part of what the Justice Department called an “extended legal conversation” among federal policymakers. The meeting led to a decision to scrap a previously imposed requirement for analysis of the entire development’s environmental effects, the court document shows.

The document is the first public admission by the federal government that Bernhardt was involved in actions to reverse a previous ruling by Fish and Wildlife Service official Steve Spangle requiring that analysis.

“The developer did an end run”

Spangle, a former Arizona field supervisor for the service, has said that in fall 2017 — under political pressure from higher-ups — he reversed a 2016 ruling he had made ordering the analysis. Interior officials have denied political pressure was involved.

Spangle’s reversal led directly to a 2019 decision by the Army Corps of Engineers to reinstate a 13-year-old Clean Water Act permit for the development that had been suspended since 2016. The permit reinstatement has since been challenged in a lawsuit filed by environmental groups that is still pending.

Last year, after Spangle made his allegations, first to the Arizona Daily Star and then to other media outlets, Interior officials would not respond to questions about Bernhardt’s involvement.

Spangle has long suspected that Bernhardt was the “high-ranking political” appointee who told an Interior Department attorney to tell him that “your position (on Vigneto) is not the administration’s position,” in Spangle’s words.

Spangle said he was told that by Peg Romanik, an attorney in the department’s solicitor’s office, on Aug. 31, 2017, two weeks after Bernhardt met privately with Mike Ingram, El Dorado’s CEO. Romanik has not commented on Spangle’s allegation.

Retired since 2018, Spangle told the Star recently that the court record showing Bernhardt’s involvement vindicates his suspicion.

What normally would happen in a dispute like this is that the Corps’ southwestern regional office would elevate the issue to agency higher-ups, ultimately taking it to Washington, D.C., officials for review, he said. In fact, Corps officials in Arizona had told him they would do that — before Interior officials in Washington intervened, he said.

“That process was short-circuited when the developer did an end run and went straight to Bernhardt,” Spangle said.

Spangle and Romanik did discuss the Vigneto case that same day via emails — which attorneys who filed suit against Vigneto obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act. But most of the email messages were at least partly blacked out by the federal government.

Also, Bernhardt’s official calendar shows that he held two meetings with Romanik on Aug. 31 — one before and one after the Vigneto conversation that Spangle said he had with Romanik.

In an Aug. 31 email, Romanik wrote another Interior Department attorney that a just-finished meeting with Bernhardt “was on the Corps matter,” but didn’t elaborate.

Grijalva’s committee investigating

In the same court document that disclosed Bernhardt’s involvement, Justice Department officials stood by the Interior decision not to require the detailed analysis.

Department attorneys said, among other things, that the need for the analysis was eliminated when El Dorado Holdings told federal officials in 2017 it could build the project whether the federal permit was issued or not.

That position is being challenged by the environmentalist lawsuit and by U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Tucson Democrat and chairman of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee.

Grijalva’s committee has been investigating the federal government’s handling of the Vigneto case since spring 2019.

To back up their view that no political pressure was applied to Spangle, Interior officials have noted that in summer 2019, Fish and Wildlife Service officials in Arizona revisited the case, and concluded — with no direction from Washington, D.C., officials — that Interior’s final decision voiding the sweeping environmental analysis of Vigneto was correct.

In a recent email to the Star, Bernhardt’s press secretary, Ben Goldey, called Vigneto a “nonissue” today.

He noted the Natural Resources Committee hasn’t sought information on this case since Interior turned over documents about it in late 2019 and early 2020. The committee has found no wrongdoing in this case, Goldey said.

But Grijalva told the Star the committee still hasn’t reached a conclusion on Vigneto.

The committee has received nearly 1,200 documents on the case from Interior, covering more than 15,000 pages. Those include 422 documents consisting of 2,361 pages that the department considers confidential, whose release could threaten their legal position against the environmentalists’ lawsuit.

The committee, citing the ongoing investigation, declined the Star’s request for these documents.

Grijalva said the committee’s Vigneto investigation was sidetracked by its need to investigate the June 1 incident at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., in which U.S. Park Police under the Interior Department used tear gas to clear out protestors.

He hopes the Vigneto probe will be complete by December, he said.

“We’re going to continue to pursue it aggressively and hope that we have an administration that will look at potential corruption in the (Vigneto) decision and look at flipping this thing,” Grijalva said last week, referring to his hope that Democrat Joe Biden would defeat President Trump in the election.

“Direction that we follow the law”

Bernhardt recently held a Zoom meeting with members of the Arizona Daily Star’s editorial board. The meeting was held Oct. 20, before the Star was aware of the court records showing his direct Vigneto involvement.

When asked if he gave Romanik any direction to tell Spangle to reverse his Vigneto decision, Bernhardt replied, “I can say with certainty that the only direction I have ever given Peg Romanik is a direction that we follow the law, and that we follow the law carefully and thoughtfully, responding to the parameters of law that now exist and the regulations that exist.

“I’m not certain at this point in time that I do have a recollection about a meeting that may or may not have happened three years ago.”

He blasted Spangle’s past allegation that Romanik told him he should reverse his stance if he knew what was good for him politically.

“Let me be very clear about a statement like that. I believe that is a false statement,” Bernhardt said.

Environmentalists seek to document “political pressure”

The Justice Department’s acknowledgment of Bernhardt’s involvement came in a legal brief filed in January.

The document was filed in opposition to a still-pending request by environmental groups filing the Vigneto lawsuit to obtain sworn statements from Spangle and Jason Douglas, a biologist in the wildlife service’s Tucson office, in an effort to document the alleged political interference.

The Justice Department brief said the “extended interagency legal conversation” involving Bernhardt dealt with the Clean Water Act permit.

The issue was whether that permit sought by Vigneto developers — for dredging and filling of washes for the project — was directly related to the entire development. Spangle’s original decision requiring a detailed environmental analysis found that such a connection exists.

“It’s likely that an appreciable volume of groundwater will be withdrawn to serve the development,” Spangle wrote in 2016. “That is likely to reduce the river’s flow,” in stretches proposed or designated as critical habitat for three endangered and threatened species, Spangle wrote.

In its brief, however, the Justice Department said that since this development can proceed without the federal permit, development activities outside the washes are outside the Army Corps’ control.

In a November 2019 letter to Grijalva’s committee, Interior official Cole Rojewski said Spangle’s original position put the department at risk of violating its legal obligations.

“In fact, the developer raised those concerns to the (Corps and the wildlife service), noting the ‘overzealous nature’ of certain staff,’” Rojewski wrote. “This type of behavior erodes the trust bestowed by the public, local and state government partners and even other federal agencies.”

Responding, environmentalist attorney Stu Gillespie said a development that could be built without a permit won’t have a transportation network capable of handling the project’s traffic load, because it would need to fill the washes to build the needed roads. The development built without a permit will dump its traffic onto an existing road, Arizona 90, causing gridlock, he said.

“El Dorado decided to short-circuit the process by secretly meeting with Bernhardt and getting him to direct Spangle to get out of the way,” Gillespie concluded.