The new state program encourages the restoration of choice wildlife habitat and habitat linkages by offering landowners and developers greater incentives and convenience than traditional mitigation. Conservation banking allows mandated mitigation requirements to become an economic asset that can be bought and sold.
"Cost-effective, market-driven solutions that conserve natural resources and foster compatible economic development are at the forefront of Governor Wilson's efforts to integrate environmental and economic objectives," Secretary for Resources Douglas P. Wheeler said.
Wheeler and Secretary for the California Environmental Protection Agency James M. Strock, who co-chair the Governor's Wetlands Task Force, announced the new Wilson administration policy at the dedication in April of the first conservation bank in Carlsbad Highlands, along with representatives of the Bank of America, the Interior Department, The Nature Conservancy, and the Building Industry Association of Southern California.
Strock said piecemeal mitigation often is slow, expensive, burdensome to the landowner, and only marginally successful because of limited environmental value for lack of connection with surrounding ecosystems.
"We have found that a market-based approach provides greater environmental protection at lower total cost," Strock said.
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said conservation banking strikes a balance between development and conservation in regional planning, and could be instrumental in creating a regional network of wildlife and open-space preserves.
"We must seize this moment at the threshold of so much development and ... envision a landscape that embodies biodiversity, open space, and quality of life," Babbitt said at the opening of the Carlsbad Highlands Conservation Bank.
The program allows for restoring habitat according to regional priorities, so that, for instance, wetlands loss in one area can be mitigated by protecting coastal areas or woodlands elsewhere.
"It's a real model of collaboration and partnership," said Martin Stein, vice chairman of the Bank of America, which owns the Carlsbad Highlands Conservation Bank, a 180-acre site unsuitable for development because of environmental constraints.
"We had property we knew should be preserved, but there was no mechanism to do it. We had to appeal to developers and landowners, and make an environmental statement that was correct and viable. The process worked, and it can be replicated," Stein said.
A conservation bank may be established in connection with a regulatory pen-nit or contract between a landowner and a regulatory agency. It must include a manager, specific geographical boundaries of the bank and the region it will serve, property protection measures and regulations, and provisions requiring the manager to submit an annual report to the regulatory agency.
Prior to sale of credits, the appropriate regulatory agency must approve a resource management plan. After a credit is sold, the land in the bank must be permanently protected through fee title or conservation easement, a means to bar development.
Buyers may purchase credits to preserve specific resources, enhance a degraded resource, restore a resource to historical condition, or create a specific resource condition where none existed.
"It is better to have more than one option when faced with the need to mitigate," said Amy Glad , executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Southern California.
The Carlsbad Highlands site will help to implement the state's model Natural Community Conservation Planning (NCCP) Program, which works with landowners and developers to protect coastal sage scrub habitat for the gnatcatcher and other species, while allowing for environmentally compatible economic growth.
Steve Johnson, director of conservation science for The Nature Conservancy, said conservation banks are a powerful new tool that will advance large-scale regional cooperative efforts like the NCCP.
"The old way of doing business left us with little heaps of small change strewn around the landscape," Johnson said. "Conservation banking allows us to gather up that small change and invest it in something worthwhile, to build a portfolio of ecologically valuable lands that the next generation will find a suitable legacy."
The state Department of Fish and Game has established mitigation banks in the Central Valley, and authorizes credits at these sites for wetlands lost in urban areas.
Mitigation banking sites include the award-winning Coles Levee Ecosystem Preserve in Kem County; Beach Lake, operated by the California Department of Transportation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Ducks Unlimited at Stone Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Sacramento County; and the new Wildlands Mitigation Bank, owned by Wildlands, Inc., a private wetlands mitigation development company.
Wildlands, billed as the first commercial mitigation bank of its kind in California, sells mitigation credits at its 315-acre wetland and upland site 22 miles north of Sacramento. The nearly completed 80-acre first phase features native habitat such as vernal pools, seasonal marshes, and oak woodlands designed to accommodate more than 70 species of plants, and attract listed species such as the Swainson's hawk, fairy shrimp, and giant garter snake.
"For an ecosystem to function, it takes a variety of habitat - wetlands, uplands, and a buffer," Wildlands President Steve Morgan said. (Copies of the new state policy are available at the Resources Agency, 1416 Ninth St., Room 131 1, Sacramento, CA, 95814. Telephone: 916-653-5656.)