Tips and Techniques – Section 7 Training

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Tips and Techniques

The Current Administration’s Broader Approach to Emergency Consultation

Shortly after the energy emergency declaration, a document was released in April 2025 titled “ALTERNATIVE PROCEDURES FOR INFORMAL SECTION 7 CONSULTATION” describing alternative procedures set out by the Acting Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service (Paul Souza)... the idea by the administration is to use these procedures to reduce perceived delays in the consultation timeline.

Programmatic Consultations

Though the development and use of programmatic consultations has been part of the consultation practice for at least 35 years, guidance on how to approach these programmatic consultations has been minimal. This has resulted in many non-standard approaches to construction and to naming conventions for programmatics - creating a good deal of confusion over the subject.... For all these reasons, I am building a course dedicated to clearing some of the confusion around these programmatic approaches and describing a process that action agencies and the Services can use to make them more likely to succeed.

7(d) and Irreversible or Irretrievable Commitment of Resources During Section 7 Consultation

The purpose of section 7(d) is to preserve options in case the consultation eventually concludes that the proposed project is likely to jeopardize a listed species or is likely to result in the destruction or adverse modification of designated critical habitat.

Emergency Consultation

Practitioners often have questions about emergency consultations because they usually occur under somewhat chaotic circumstances and don't follow the normal process that non-emergency consultations do... so I've boiled down emergency consultations to a couple of key thoughts...

But For and Reasonably Certain to Occur

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the value of reading preambles in federal register notices to give context to words and processes. While preparing some training materials for my online courses, an example came to mind - the phrases “but for” and “reasonably certain to occur” (sometimes abbreviated to ‘rcto’ just to confuse new practitioners).

Preambles to Regulations

An often-overlooked source of insight into the rules and process of consultation are the preambles to regulations. Any time a regulation is put in place, or changed, it has to be published in the Federal Register (the “Government’s Newspaper”) https://www.federalregister.gov/. I have posted what I think are the 3 most relevant Federal Register notices for consultation practitioners on our Resources page.

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