New grant provides impetus for habitat conservation planning in Sonoma County

The Board of Supervisors has bolstered habitat conservation planning efforts in Sonoma County by agreeing to put up matching funds to support receipt of a $755,000 U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife Service grant in collaboration with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The grant will help streamline regulations by analyzing the habitat of dozens of threatened or endangered species and identifying potential mitigation measures to protect important species from development.

The Board voted Tuesday to accept the grant and approve a budget adjustment of $188,750, initially approved in 2019, to be used as the local 25 percent matching funds for the grant. The funds will launch the Sonoma County Regional Habitat Conservation Plan/Natural Communities Conservation Plan with a foundational phase to determine the species to include, the partners who might participate and the boundaries for the plan.

Permit Sonoma will lead a stakeholder outreach and planning phase by creating of a science advisory program for compiling and assessing baseline information.

Once it is developed and implemented, the Habitat Conservation Plan/Natural Communities Conservation Plan will provide a streamlined compliance pathway for projects that would otherwise be delayed by the stringent, complicated, and time-consuming endangered species regulatory approval process. This streamlining is achieved by developing upfront mitigation and conservation standards for specific development projects thereby avoiding time-intensive project-by-project review.

The program will help protect critical species while creating regulatory certainty for developers. By providing the location and costs of mitigation and conservation early in the project development process, unexpected financial and regulatory obstacles should become less common. However, the benefits of the Habitat Conservation Plan/Natural Communities Conservation Plan process only apply within the boundaries of the plan, for the species covered by the plan, and for the permittees included in the plan.

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Media Contact:
Bradley Dunn, Policy Manager 
Bradley.Dunn@sonoma-county.org
(707) 321-0502
2550 Ventura Ave.
Santa Rosa, CA 95403