The Growing Role of Transportation Funding in Regional Habitat Conservation Planning

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Regional conservation initiatives struggle to meet funding needs when complying with the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1996 and need money early to pay for required planning and to acquire land to mitigate the impact of development. Transportation agencies struggle to comply with the ESA and have increasingly been willing to fund regional habitat conservation plans (RHCPs) to do so. We review documents from 22 RHCPs and interview representatives of 16 RHCPs to understand how transportation agencies have contributed to funding RHCPs. We find that transportation agencies mitigate their impacts and provide early and consistent financing to facilitate the planning process, help RHCPs establish initial conservation preserves, and allow RHCPs to capitalize on lower land prices during downturns in the development market. We only sample RHCPs in a few states, however, and these examples may not comply with laws in others. Many of the cases studied are recent; time is needed to assess their long-term success. We recommend further study to assess applications to sectors beyond transportation and beyond the areas we studied.

Takeaway for practice: Transportation agencies have struggled to meet environmental requirements and habitat conservation agencies have typically considered transportation agencies threats to the environment. Where adversarial relationships can be overcome, partnerships between transportation and conservation programs can effectively finance habitat conservation while facilitating capital investments in transportation systems.

Keywords:

• habitat conservation
• finance
• Endangered Species Act
• transportation
• environmental permitting

Notes

1. Mitigation measures may include payment into an established conservation fund or bank; preservation (via acquisition or conservation easement) of existing habitat; enhancement or restoration of degraded or a former habitat; establishment of buffer areas around existing habitats; modifications of land use practices; and restrictions on access. See also Austin et al. (2007).

2. FWS and NMFS share joint authorities under the ESA for administering the incidental take permit program. Generally, the FWS is responsible for “terrestrial and freshwater aquatic species,” and NMFS is responsible for listed “marine mammals, anadromous fish, and other living marine resources” (FWS & NMFS, 1996, pp. 1–3). In this article we focus only on HCPs that deal with urban development, and therefore implicate FWS as the enforcement agency.

3. Transportation projects that receive federal funding or are undertaken by a federal agency (i.e., they have a federal nexus) are not required to form an HCP; instead, they are required to complete an interagency consultation under Section 7 of the ESA, a similar but legally distinct procedure (16 U.S.C. §1536; Lederman & Wachs, 2014a).While there are legal differences between analysis of project impacts under Section 7 and Section 10, both require projects that harm endangered species to bear the burden of compensatory mitigation. Section 7 projects can also be covered by an RHCP, which streamlines project approval by providing the necessary biological analysis and conservation framework, and reduces costs through economies of scale achieved through acquisition of larger mitigation parcels (Lederman & Wachs, 2014a; Sciara & Stryjewski, 2015). HCPs are increasingly important to transportation agencies because federal transportation funding has been steadily decreasing. The responsibility for funding infrastructure is shifting to state and local sources (Crabbe, Hiatt, Poliwka, & Wachs, 2005; Puentes & Bailey, 2003), increasing the number of transportation projects that must meet ESA requirements by forming or participating in an HCP.

4. A table listing the attributes of many of the RHCPs can be found in our earlier work (Lederman & Wachs, 2014b).

5. Development fees are highly dependent upon local land prices and political conditions, and also vary for different land types and locations within each RHCP. For these reasons, we caution that comparing fees among different RHCPs studied in this article would be misleading. The following are some examples of development fee charges by RHCPs. The Coachella Valley MSHCP development fees for 2015 to 2016 range from $239 per unit, per acre, for residential development with 14 or more units per acre, to $5,809 per acre for industrial or commercial development (Coachella Valley Mountains Conservancy, 2015).The San Joaquin MSCP charges $7,807 per acre for development of multipurpose open space land, $15,596 per acre for development of agricultural land, and $90,273 per acre for development of land containing vernal pools (San Joaquin Council of Governments, 2015). The Santa Clara Valley MSHCP development fees for 2016 to 2017 range from $4,853 per acre for development on small vacant urban sites, to $19,159 per acre for ranchlands, to $407,119 per acre for development on seasonal wetlands (Santa Clara Valley Habitat Agency, 2016).

6. A 1999 state law prohibits county-led HCPs from taking a “regulatory approach” by requiring participation in the RHCP and states that “[a] governmental entity may not, as a condition for the issuance of a permit, approval, or service, require a person to: (1) pay a mitigation fee to a plan participant….”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jaimee Lederman

Jaimee Lederman ([email protected]) is an attorney -pursuing a doctorate in urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Martin Wachs

Martin Wachs ([email protected]) is distinguished professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering and city and regional planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.