WASHINGTON, DC — Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties) today introduced a bill that will protect the Navy’s ability to test weapon systems at Naval Base Ventura County’s San Nicolas Island and other testing areas in the wake of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s failed sea otter translocation program.

Gallegly’s Military Readiness and Southern Sea Otter Conservation Act will create new military readiness areas around all testing grounds off the Southern California coast, so as sea otters migrate into these waters the Navy will be able to continue its current activities while still offering protections for the animals.

“This bill will allow the Navy to continue testing and exercises off the Southern California coast, which is vital to our national defense, while also allowing the southern sea otter to expand its habitat to wherever it wants,” Gallegly said. It also protects endangered abalones and Southern California commercial shellfish fishing industry.

Sea otters were placed at San Nicholas Island in 1987 in hopes that they would establish a population there and stay out of the FWS’s no-otter zone south of Point Conception. The otters did not cooperate, however, and repeatedly violated the no-otter zone.

While the program was abandoned in 1993, it is only now being officially terminated.

Under the program, the Navy was allowed to treat the sea otters as a threatened species. With termination of the program, any sea otters that remain on San Nicholas Island would have to be treated with the more restrictive endangered classification.

If the Navy is forced to treat the sea otters as endangered it could jeopardize all testing and other activities around San Nicolas Island.

Gallegly’s bill directs FWS to take into account the recovery of endangered black and white abalone, along with the commercial harvest of shellfish fisheries, when enacting a new management plan for the recovery of southern sea otters. Both abalone and shellfish are prime food sources for the southern sea otter.