SDCP - Steering Committee
Pima County Public Works Bldg. Rm 'C'
6:00pm to 9:00pm
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
Meeting Notes
Participants: See attached sign-in sheet David Steele, Maeveen Behan and SIMG staff.
Documents made available to the Steering Committee members at the study session:
* Agendas
*
Meeting Commenced at 6:00 pm
Meeting commenced with 22 Steering Committee members and 6 members of the general public. David Steele opened the meeting by introducing himself, reviewing the ground rules and reviewing the agenda.
Logistics for the next Meeting:
Wednesday, November 6, 2002
6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Four Points Sheraton
1900 E. Speedway Blvd.
Logistics for the next Ad-Hoc Subcommittee meeting:
Monday, October 28, 2002
3:00 pm to 5:pm
Red Sky Conference Room
1661 N. Swan Road
Suite 118
Old Business:
Sonoran Desert Conservation Goals and Statement of Principles:
Steering Committee member, Cindy Coping had originally requested time on the agenda to make this presentation, however she had a scheduling conflict and Steering Committee member, Ernie Cohen gave the presentation in her stead. This is a follow-on of a previous discussion that the Steering Committee and the Ad Hoc Committee has had as well, in that, a number of members feel it's imperative that the report state quite clearly-A) the Steering Committee's reaction to the goals that are being expressed in the current county plan, and B) any additional ones the Steering Committee may have.
Ernie:
Call to the Public:
None.
New Business:
Time frame for the Section 10 Permit
Type of Section 10 Permit (mitigate take, regional or hybrid)
Section 10 EIS Strategies, and Geographic Implications
Maeveen Beham gave a presentation on these topics followed by a question and answer period.
Maeveen: Thank you for having me back. I thought I would cover three topics in response to the request for information for me to be here. And the first one would be to repeat and expand a bit on what we talked about last time, which is, what if you took a small scale approach to the conservation permit, Section 10 permit, at the beginning, and worked towards a regional approach, what are the tradeoffs there, and I thought I would just go a little bit more into that. And talk about how, maybe a little bit about the history of mitigation ratios, just very quickly, and then how they've been applied here through Section 7 consultations, so that you'll understand the logic. What I did before I came to this meeting was just tried to put myself in your shoes, and my goal today is not to tell you any answers, but to give you ways to think about things. I thought that would help. As part of that, I brought the table of contents for the Habitat Conservation Planning Handbook. This is a little dated, and there have been a couple of policies that have been adopted and put in it, and I know some of you have this because you make reference to it, but I wanted to give this to you because all of the topics are covered, to an extent, in here. So if you want, we can just make sure every individual has the entire handbook, and that can be your bible, and almost your guideline, for going through and dealing with these issues for the Section 10 permit. I also have a handout that shows the timeline for the federal process. This comes straight from the handbook. But what it shows you is that, once you make a preferred alternative recommendation on a preferred alternative, there's a lot of time built into the federal process that follows. I don't know if people are really aware of that. I don't know that any process has involved the public to the extent we have, up front like this. Usually the public process is after the HCP is proposed, and then the comments come through the NEPA process. So we have a whole other life in front of us of process. I want to show you that.
Second topic I wanted, I promised you at the last meeting I would talk about land availability. We have mapped out the vacant land that is not within the conservation land system. And I can tell you exact acreages. And as a subset of that, it 's always concerned me that there's some people who are major participants in the conservation plan who weren't a part of the comprehensive plan process. And so, you might not be aware, and I always wish that Larry had heard this talk, and I always wish that Ernie had heard a certain talk, that the people who went through the comprehensive plan had to hear too often, so I have a real compressed version of that, the result of it is that I want to convey what the county's interest is, given all available land for development, what the county's interest is in choosing the places that are most suitable for development to preserve the tax base. It's such an important issue to us, is the ordering principle of the comprehensive plan, and I feel like if I gave you that knowledge, you might really come to understand the fiscal issue for the county.
And then my third topic is only to touch on the fact that we do have these EIS issue papers that follow the cost model, and I want to make a plea for you to invite me back to give you a presentation on the EIS issue papers, which will all be completed by the next meeting you have. It covers all of the topics that have been scoped. So those are basically my three topics. Little bit more detail about mitigation versus regional. Touch on land availability issues, which is kind of the secret of the universe, what land is available for development, how much, how much population could it accommodate, who owns it, I've got that answer. And then breeze through this cost model, give you an update on the economic consultant, we had our pre-proposal meeting, and then get out of your way, and take some questions, if that's okay with you for me to proceed like that.
The topic of mitigation approach to the conservation plan versus regional was something I brought up at the last meeting because it seemed to me that the Steering Committee might be headed towards a recommendation that would be deemed, by those who don't understand all of the ways you can achieve conservation goals, that it might be deemed unrealistic at the outset. And the reason I said that is because we're such a big region. And so when you look at eastern Pima County, and if, I know, Larry, you weren't here at the last meeting, but I just want to make this point, that the biggest, there's been one regional plan that's as big as ours, in a sense, and that's Clark County. The Clark County, the way they achieved their conservation plan was to, they have some private land in the middle of this huge BLM holding, and they actually took BLM land and released it for development. Very, almost the reverse dynamic of what we're going through, which is to say, there's land that we want to see committed to conservation. Now, they also did that, they took the remaining BLM land and committed it to conservation, but it was federal land, and that's how Clark County got through their process. That just makes them different in kind, you almost can't compare them as a regional plan, because their issues were so easy compared to ours.
Now, when you look at San Diego, the reason I said we need to be mindful of the difference in scope between Pima County and San Diego, San Diego had, they brag, 30 governments participating, the most complex, and it was the most expensive, their land is expensive. But all of that plan, with the entire County of San Diego, city, and all the municipalities, would fit into one of our watersheds, Altar Valley, and we'd still have 130,000 acres leftover in Altar Valley. And so there's a requirement in the law, in Section 10, that states that you have to have a funding strategy that's viable, and Fish & Wildlife signs off on that, and you will remember that the first 200 HCP's were all very small. So funding strategy for a half acre is a lot different than a funding strategy for a very large plan. And the large plans that have come through, like Austin, relatively large, and San Diego, have proposed funding strategies that allowed them to get a permit, and then their funding strategy didn't hold. They promised to come through with a voter initiative, they promised in different places that it would cost a certain amount, and in San Diego it doubled quickly. And this has sort of brought new vigor to that requirement. People want to see the funding committed to, in a stricter sense, that has been committed by regions before. Now, take that ethos and apply it in a place where we're 10 times the size of San Diego. And I just thought that I wanted to give you those scales to think about, because I would hate for everyone to agree to an idealistic plan, and then somehow not have thought along the way about how to achieve it in a realistic fashion. So, what I proposed was, and you see this in the cost model, so we've been talking about this since May, that you can work towards the ideal. And you can capture your goals and the milestones in working towards this ideal in the original permit. So we're talking now about the art of the permit. You can take something at the beginning that's very achievable, and commit to that and do it very well, and work towards these, you can move through milestones, and the framing of those milestones would be a major community discussion, and you work towards an ultimate goal. When we thought about this last spring, we thought that the groundwater code was a good model for this. Where, over the course of 5 decades, a goal that was unachievable at the beginning, is expected and it's normal, even halfway through the many decade process. And their milestones, their goal, essentially, was to have the basin in balance, you're not withdrawing more water than recharge, was pretty much unachievable, because of the way the economies had vested around the administration of water at that time, it was unachievable. So if they had given up on their ideal, if it had never been stated, if it had never been tied to the original approach, I think maybe the community would have lost track of it. Since they found a way to move towards it and overcome some of the short term problems, now we take it as an expectation. And that, I thought, might be a way to step through the decades and to implement this plan. We've always said, you can look at the very first document in 1998, we said it would take 5 decades to implement. There was never an expectation from county administration that the moment we submit our application to Fish and Wildlife, it's done. It's achieved, it's all bought, it's all conserved. And so that's why I proposed, maybe, considering some flexibility in the approach to achieving the ideal. And if you like that idea, we have thought through the variables in the cost model that was issued in May What we did was, and this is what I want to talk about, I'll give you some examples of regional plans and mitigation plans, to show you the divide. There's been one plan that worked towards a long term goal, and it's nowhere on the scale of what we're talking about. So this is new, the hybrid is new. We've talked about, Fish and Wildlife considered this over time, talked about it with Paul Fromer(?), and it really could be the Solomon's compromise to this. The mitigation plan, and this is how HCP started out, was, you're going to, you anticipate and you define with particularity, what you're going to impact as the permit applicant. And you describe that. You almost do a species headcount, because that's the way the law reads, you have to describe take, and then level of take, is it harassment, is it lethal take, what is it that you're asking for a permit for. Then you offset that with land within the area because you change the nature of your project or you go and you replace that land somewhere else. So that's how things started with Section 10, to greatly simplify it. Early on, if you want to just try to grasp where do these mitigation ratios come from, the Army Corps, in their consultations with Fish and Wildlife, under the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, came up with a standard. So that mitigation ratios weren't just, let's make a deal. There was some standard that was applied over and over, and this took many years for them to arrive at the standard. But the standard was, no net loss, no net loss. If you think about what that means, it almost suggests a mitigation ratio. There's a certain amount of riparian, the Army Corps and Fish and Wildlife would like to see that much riparian held. So if a project proponent is going to impact riparian habitat, they have to go and restore or rebuild or replace. That was the no net loss policy. So it's almost a one to one ratio. But the difficulty of it is that, the history has been that the replacement habitat has not been successful. But it's policy that created the template for mitigation ratios, if you want to think about it that way.
Then, with Section 10 permits, the endangered species overlay to riparian issues created another level of complexity. Because people who understand what you've just added to that equation with endangered species understand that no net loss is insufficient when you're dealing with a resource that's on the brink. You have to do more. You have to work to recover. The early mitigation ratios were what Fish and Wildlife could bargain for. They weren't tied to the species' need, and so you saw a national policy proposed different from no net loss which said, have a principled approach for mitigation that's tied to species' needs. And it's going to be different for each one, it's going to be different. Our experience, our most direct experience in Pima County is with the pygmy owl. The way that mitigation ratio was determined was that the, to oversimplify this, that the scientists from the recovery team looked at the sites where pygmy owls were and determined how much impact pygmy owls could withstand, and came up with a percent of open space or natural habitat that they needed within their range. And that's essentially how they came up with, they say they need 80%, and came up with this mitigation ratio. That's a great over-simplification, but what I'm trying to suggest is that each group of species experts thinks through how to come up with a mitigation ratio. Currently, for Pima pineapple cactus, the mitigation ratios have been negotiated at one to one, two to one, and the service says that if a project were to create a jeopardy situation for Pima pineapple cactus, they would ask for three to one. Now you can go to other places in the United States and see old growth forests, impacts to them being mitigated at a ratio of 15 to one, because the understanding is, that's not going to come back. It's not going to come back in time to lead to short term recovery. Seeing that mitigation ratio from other parts of the country as a precedent, it surprised me that the mitigation ratio for the pygmy owl was only four to one, given that ironwood's not going to bounce back, our habitat isn't going to bounce back. You see that dilemma in different parts of the country. You can bring a loblolly pine back a lot faster than you can bring back a saguaro. But there was a principled approach to determining the mitigation ratio for pygmy owls, and that's there for a guidance for us. And the same is true to an extent for Pima pineapple cactus. They thought this through. It doesn't exist for a lot of other species, and so Fish and Wildlife responds to me when I say, what's a reasonable mitigation ratio for the MSCP, and their response is, there's no requirement for a mitigation ratio. That's part of a proposal, that's part of the deal, that the permit applicant might propose. So we have guidance on two species and a lot of discussion to take place with the rest. The mitigation plans that, I think, are the most famous are Austin. Austin characterizes itself as a regional plan, but it's not, it's a mitigation plan. And one of the first signs that you're headed on the path of a mitigation plan is that you restrict yourself to listed species. They did a determination of how much land they thought they were going to impact through development over the course of the permit, and they offset that with open space that's on the order of Tucson Mountain Park. That's essentially what they did. It's not a regional plan, it's a park. It's a mitigation bank for a short list of listed species. That's what Austin has. They don't have a regional plan. They aren't going to preserve the natural system. They didn't set out to do that. So they have a small scale plan. And the requirement when you take on that plan is that you have more rigor, in your accounting you have more rigor. So a 20,000 acre mitigation plan really should rise to the same standard as the half acre mitigation plan where you have a good understanding of what species are on the land that you're going to impact, and a good understanding of what the mitigation land holds. Our best example locally is Pima County's pineapple cactus mitigation bank, where we counted pineapple cactus, we counted acres of suitable habitat, and we set that aside. Fish and Wildlife has a mitigation ratio, and that is part of the whole banking process.
So if you wanted to go the mitigation route, a way to approach that would be to say, where is Pima County going to step with its future impacts, with its projects, and we have all those mapped. With its capital projects, for 20 years. With its development. Where is it going to step, and what's it going to step on? And that drives where you have to go to offset that impact. Because if you're stepping on owl habitat, you can't trade that for pineapple cactus habitat. So the mitigation approach has, in a sense, a higher standard for species count. It's very short term, it doesn't set out to solve regional issues or even solve natural resources at all. It's just to solve a compliance problem.
The regional approach in San Diego is the best example of a regional plan that isn't held to the standard of doing a headcount on species. Instead, they framed their permit in terms of habitat types. Instead of having to count species and acres, they were able to establish a goal, and their goal was to restore natural function, ecosystem function. A very grand goal. But that's a goal that they set, and because of the number of acres that they committed to conservation, it was a combination of federal and private land, because of the number of acres, the Service accepted less rigor in the biology, the soft lines instead of hard lines, that's one way to think about it. Because they believed that the robustness of the acreage would capture the protection they were seeking when they did a species specific count. So the major differences between a mitigation approach and a regional approach are that a regional approach, you can establish a goal. In a mitigation approach, you really have to do a finer scale biological analysis. If you were to take a hybrid approach and start with a mitigation plan and move towards a regional plan, you'd have to pass milestones so that you, so that Fish and Wildlife felt there was enough protected to have a ??? milestones, we're in our own world doing that, we're on our own doing that. It could be framed in terms of recovering species, it could be framed in terms of number of acres protected, it could be framed in terms of how many acres of each different habitat type. When you achieve certain milestones, the art of this permit could be that development restrictions are eased over time, so that you have aligned incentives with the conservation and thedevelopment community going forward. So that's the art of drafting this. It's very enchanting for us to be able to do this, it's just very enchanting, and there's a lot of options for us.
One suggestion I have is that we think about all of the ways to describe milestones. Maybe we'll include them all, as a check and balance. Maybe we'll discard some. But if you include a habitat based approach, what happens is, you can build another trapdoor into that permit that captures species who become imperiled or endangered or listed that we just don't know about today. So we don't have the San Diego problem where they get a list and it has a number to it, and then almost the day they get the permit, something else is listed and it's not on there, on their covered species. If you took a habitat approach, you could have the habitat covered, you could be able to open a trapdoor, that species would be able to be added to the list without creating a whole new pygmy owl dilemma. And I think it's our mistake if we don't think of these things as we craft the permit, going forward. So those are some of the different, expansion of mitigation versus regional plan, and this hybrid approach which I believemight be the Solomon's compromise. We might also be, if you really want to do something new in the United States, doing that well would be spectacular.
To give you a way to think this through, you can look at the habitat conservation handbook, but I think that whenever I've talked to people and they are dealing with this topic, I think the overlay of regulations sometimes causes a confusion that you might not need. So we did an analysis, and I just want to tell you what this says. So if you just, like, free your mind of Section 10 and regulations and all that just for a moment, and think about, what if the goal just is, you want to stabilize the natural resource system, what if that's the goal? How close are we to achieving that today. And that's an analysis that John Reagan and I did where we took the current county holding and took the 55 p??? vulnerable species to see if we captured a little of everything in the current county holdings, current county land. And the answer is, we did. Noah's raft. And if we weren't worried about a Section 10 permit at all, one way to go forward to achieve the conservation land system, the ark, would be to think about what species we wanted to have a project specific focus on, a program around, think about what habitats we want to include along the way, think about a timeline, that will help you prioritize costs, and that's your work plan. That's your work plan. I just think that's a useful starting point for analysis, because the next overlay can be, to what extent does that resolve Section 10 compliance issues, and to what extent do you tie this up in a Section 10 permit, yes or no. When I talked to the science team over the course of years, they never had a focus on Section 10. They never did. Their focus was really on, who's in trouble, where are these plants and animals, where are the threats, and how do we move towards protecting them. And if you understand that, what you can relieve yourself of is this concern that they didn't try to get the answer as accurate as possible. It's in their interest to know the right answer, because they want, not the Section 10 permit to work, they want the conservation land system to work. So that's their interest, and it remains their interest. When they were formulating the science commission, they don't want to be the governors of the Section 10 permit. They want to ask and answer questions about the true state of the system and whether or not we need to improve pieces and knowledge along the way to achieve their goals. So I thought I would introduce that topic to you, too, and that's really all I had to say about mitigation, regional, and how to kind of think through that.
Questions:
Question: Can you crystallize the difference between a mitigation take plan and a regional plan?
Maeveen: Sure, I will. I'll tell you why this became such an intriguing topic for us, and I forgot to say this part, I said it at the last meeting, and I want to make sure you hear this. When we started out four years ago, Pima County government, as permit seeker, had substantial pygmy owl issues to deal with. Okay, what I really want to say is, when we started out, when Pima County government started out, we really needed a Section 10 permit. We really needed one. What has happened in the last years is, Marana, City of Tucson and Sahuarita have annexed, I think, 63 square miles? And PAG changed their population projections. So, four years ago they said, Pima County is going to see half the urban growth, 157,000 people over the next 20 years. And now they say we're going to see 36,000. That's eye-opening to realize that it goes right to the heart of, what is your take issue as a partner with the development community? It's much less than it was. So that's one thing. Another change is that Marana annexed a lot of our problems. Sahuarita and the City annexed a lot of the pineapple cactus problems. And when the conservation land system came in, 97% of it's in unincorporated Pima County, and it is a prescription of the solution. So there's this pineapple cactus habitat that is in Sahuarita that is in the City of Tucson's new annexed land that they're going to have to deal with. But it's not what the science community is saying, it's the best place to save pineapple cactus. So Pima County finds itself holding almost all of the solution and almost none of the problem. As the sort of regional leader in thinking this through, that doesn't make us abandon the goal, but the mechanism, we adopted those goals in our comprehensive plan. That's the other accident of history is that at the local level, we've expressed our conservation ethic for cultural resources and natural resources in the adopted comprehensive plan. So we can take a new approach and still achieve the goals and ask along the way,does it make sense to have a coincidence between the Section 10 permit and the local plan, and how would you like to phase that? Now what happens is, Marana's got a tough problem. And the City of Tucson, they don't really know it, but they've got a tough problem, and Sahuarita has a tough problem. So the need for the sort of partnerships there becomes more compelling, too. So the take issues are different. And that opens up opportunities in strategy towards achieving, I personally don't think the Section 10 permit is the one and only trophy to this process. I don't think so. I think it's an important practical insurance policy that needs to be procured for the community, but the community really needs it a lot more in Marana, City of Tucson and Sahuarita than they do in unincorporated Pima County. So we realize that. When we were calculating our take, our take issues, and you come to the question with the Fish and Wildlife Service, why are you asking for a permit that's so far beyond the scope of what your take issue is, and the answer would be, because we'd like to achieve a regional goal through the federal permit. Now, not everybody agrees with that. Not everybody's ready to sign up for that, that's very scary to some people. But to the extent that the Steering Committee has said, that's what we want, then I'm suggesting that there's a way to work towards that, and we've got the time and the ingenuity to do it.
Question: Can you provide some guidance to the Steering Committee as to how state trust lands might fit into a habitat based approach, even though the State land department hasn't been party to this plan, given the way it was initially conceived?
Maeveen: Good question. I'm going to translate it to, can we go forward, or at what rate can we go forward without state land agreeing to the strategy from the outset. That's my understanding of the question. I would say, when you look at what Pima County really needs in the short term to offset take, we don't need the State land department. When you look forward 50 years and say, we can, there's 3 ways to achieve conservation goals, regulate, acquire and cooperate. I don't think that, when I talk about the ingenuity that might be worked into our plan, I don't think communities have scratched the surface of what's possible. So if we work to incorporate a safe harbor aspect to our plan and go forward and have project specific reintroductions, we could go a long way towards, if the milestones were, bring back this frog, bring back this fish, we could go a long way without regulating, without acquiring. Those are some of the goals that could be expressed in these milestones. I guess I just see that as real untapped potential, that we don't really have to take this kind of refuge mentality or the approach that has gone before, but you could build assurances that cooperation, a new method of achieving conservation, landowner incentive based method, that wasn't just acquisition, achieve the goal. You could build in those kinds of checks and milestones along the way. That's the potential I see, since we've got a little bit of time, potentially, to achieve this. So state land not being here in the short term is not a problem for a Section 10 permit. When I go to the Marana Steering Committee meeting and listen to the discussion from the State Land Commissioner, he's a willing seller. He's a willing seller. We're in a long range business right now, and government, bureaucrats will change and the positions will change, and I've always said this about state land, and I got this from Jesse J??? from BLM, that every government participating has a trump card. We all have a reason why we can't make this work. And we all chose not to play that trump card, except for state land. And so state land's position that they need some term met before, is really, all of us could say that, and I believe that in the future, state land could have a different position and could be more like the other participating entities, and there's 20 of them. So I think, not only can we sort of meet their conditions, as we must meet BLM's, as we must meet Bureau of Rec, as we must, you know, all that's out there. The Section 10 permit gives you the flexibility to do that. We can do that with state land, too. But for the moment, they're willing sellers.
Question: How will things be assessed as time goes on?
Maeveen: The question was, what would the milestones look like? I guess that's your question? When we originally talked about this, we thought, I thought, that we would have an adaptive management plan. And information would be perfected and goals would change over time, given the loss of certain opportunities and the commitment, the achievements that we have along the way. My proposal was, let's just go the groundwater code route and every 10 years, redo the management plan. And have everyone expect that that's what's going to happen. And what I suggested was that we reopen the permit every 10 years. And that was not really acceptable to Fish and Wildlife or to the consultant because he said, every planning process that has gone before has taken 10 years, so to reopen the permit every 10 years is the kiss of death to this. So instead of reopening the permit, rewriting the adaptive management plan, which has all these milestones and goals in it, make passage of the milestones a condition of certain, what would you say, the lessening of restrictions on development, and just tie those going forward. So you can look at an existing HCP, like the Clark County HCP, and they have very specific goals, close this many roads in this watershed, and do these real specific things. It gets that detailed. That's the kind of thing you could see in a managementplan. And the prior conversation was, redo the management plan every 10 years, moving towards this goal, the recommendation was, technically it's impossible to reopen the permit. Instead, put in place milestones.
Question: Could you give some comment about how you view the timeframe for the Section 10 Permit?
Maeveen: Timeframe for the Section 10 permit. That was just an open issue. The applicant requests the timeframe from Fish and Wildlife. They recently have brought in some policies about how to assess timeframe. But the applicant generally has made the request. The trend has been to go for longer and longer permits. Thirty years is what you saw from the early community approaches. Fifty years is more recent, and then some plans that haven't gone through are talking in terms of 100 years. So we have one HCP, pygmy owl HCP, in Pima
County, and the timeframe for it is forever. That was what the landowner agreed to, and that actually caused some concern. The landowner thought, this is Jim Shiner(?), he thought, I'm committing forever to the highest standard that would be enforced for pygmy owl protection. And he thought that was, you just can't argue with that. I heard the conservation community say, we just don't know if this deal is going to be sufficient when you commit in perpetuity. So there's concerns on all sides. We picked the 20 year guideline only because EPA sent us a letter and said, we don't like to see, in a fast growing community, a regional plan like this beyond the scope of 20 years, because you can't predict your impacts past that, that's where that comes from. But this committee could recommend something different than what EPA recommended.
Question: Is this correct that the state land must be sold or leased for the highest and best use, but once they are sold, they come into the scope of either unincorporated lands or lands of one of the governments that may have become a partner in our Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan? So that whoever is thinking of buying state land may be unwilling to buy it at a price for development if that land has been identified as land that would not be available for development.
Maeveen: Yes, it's true that the current zoning is what controls. And so in unincorporated Pima County, that's usually RH, is the largest lot we have, and that controls. There are times when an annexation and an acquisition of state land go through at the same time, under a master plan. So the zoning would change because the incorporated area would be picking it up. So that has happened.
Question: How much land is available for development?
Maeveen: I will tell you how much land is available for development. The map, here it is, secrets of the universe, map of the conservation land system. What we did was, went into the area that hasn't been identified as having this value to the science team, and did three levels of analysis. One was to ask, this is beyond unincorporated Pima County, this is all the jurisdiction. How much vacant land is there in private hands? How much vacant land is there that the state owns? Then the next question was, how much vacant land is there, how much land is there that has some improvement, but, for the first cut, it's 5 acres or more of land with value of less than $10,000 per acre. So what that tells you is, there's a shed or there's some improvement there, but it's potentially developable. Then we did the same analysis, a couple different breaks, up to $25,000. Interesting that the number didn't change very much from the 10 to 25 thousand. Vacant land, just so you know, when the assessor calls something vacant, there's nothing on it. Nothing. It's almost too rigorous. It's not a proxy for developable land, it's not. So there's a lot of land out there, ranch land, land that has an improvement, that excludes it from being classified as vacant, but it's highly developable. So that's what we were trying to get at. 98 square miles of private land that's vacant, 112 square miles of state trust land that's vacant, and then 98 square miles, or 96 square miles of land that has a small improvement on it. So 300 square miles of vacant or developable land that's not in the conservation land system. And if you want to sort of translate that to how much population can that accommodate, the answer is, the densities that we've built out at are about 3,000 people per square mile.
There's another analysis that talks about current zoning. But when you just say, let's assume we never improve densities, let's just assume we continue to go the way we have, and what it translates to, with commercial and residential and everything, is 3,000 people per square mile. So if you do the math, if you just were to build out state land, that's 336,000 new people. So 20 years of growth under current sprawling conditions, just on the one-third that represents state land. So our request to the state land department is, release that for urbanization, and we've got 20 years of growth, without doing any improvement to our densities, just continue to sprawl, we've covered 20 years of growth. State land would cover 20 years, if the private holdings were in there, then you're looking at 60 years, and that far exceeds our water budget. So the bottom line is, that's our sort of initial analysis, and what we'd love to see is some kind of ground truthing. Of this, Chris Sheafe was very articulate about saying, you know, there's vacant land and then there's vacant land, and some of it has other restrictions that make it undevelopable. It would be great to have that kind of review from people who have a feel for other kinds of use restrictions, like neighborhood concern and that sort of thing. So that's just a way of looking at it, but I was encouraged at the last meeting to hear the representative for the development community say, we will consider discussing build-out under the EIS in terms of water budget. Because when you do that, what you realize is, there's more land within in the current urbanizing area than there is water to accommodate future population. But this goes to the issue of how long is the term of the permit? It could be 20, it could be 40, it could be 60 years, and we would never have to step a toe into the conservation land system.
Question: What happens to people that own land within the conservation system, as far as the value of their land, what are they going to do with that land? Private land.
Maeveen: Oh, the value of the land would go up. If there were strategies that were adopted to develop the land in urbanizing areas, the value of the land would go up. If they can't build on it. No, we're identifying it as a growth area. The suggestion is that the land, oh, I see, you've asked, what happens to the land within the conservation land system. If the strategy was to, as it is, I mean, it has use restrictions now. It's distant from infrastructure. I mean, it's the reason it hasn't been developed so far is because the market's not there to do it. All I've suggested is that there's another constraint besides the conservation land system which is something this committee might deal with, which is water availability and the carrying capacity of this community for population.
Question: Other than the issue of acquisition strategy, how do you see that milestone philosophy differ from an adaptive management plan? Does that make sense?
Maeveen: It does, it does. I think they can be one and the same. I think they can be one and the same. What I'd like to see, though, is, you notice that adaptive management plans usually are incorporated by reference to permits. So when you think about, well, what do you have to submit? You have to submit your Habitat Conservation Plan, your Implementing Agreement and your EIS. And that's on the chart I gave you. And adaptive management plans have typically been the problems to solve in the future because we can't figure them out right now. And that's why there are no good adaptive management plans. So if you look at any community, they put off the creation of their adaptive management plan and their monitoring. At Clark County, they don't have that now. So the drafting of milestones could do better than incorporating by reference what those types of goals would be, I think.
Question: Are there any studies or anything done about water availability and extrapolating it out, like to how much capacity all the private land will hold, like in the next 20 years?
Maeveen: Question is, are there studies about water availability, and then some analysis that ties water availability to current zoning. And the answer is, there's 3 studies on water availability. It's obviously a well analyzed issue in the community. We heard last week, or last meeting, from Chris Sheafe that he thought that carrying capacity for water, if "ag" and mining uses were retired, would be about 2.2 million. That's the high end, that's the highest you'll ever hear. Then you hear something much more conservative, then the numbers change when you say, well, what's the water budget for the natural system. So you see a lot of different numbers. But they're all expressed. They're in the water element of the comprehensive plan, so you have it on disk. They're in some of the riparian documents that came out. They're in the 1999, 2000 But they're most directly expressed, with all of the historical information, in the water resources document, 2001. And then they're summarized in the EIS issue paper. It would be a good decision for this committee what population projection they'd like to adopt as an assumption. The low end, the high end, and what other uses are you considering, going forward. The question about, is there an analysis that ties water use to current zoning? There will be, because we're doing two build-out analyses. One is on just land, and one is on water tied to current zoning, so that's what I was hoping to have for this next meeting.
Question: Update on the economics consultant?
Maeveen: Update on the economics consultant. We had our pre-proposal and there were consultants from all over the country there, and a number from San Diego, a number from Phoenix, a couple local consultants, and then some from area codes that I didn't recognize, so So very sophisticated questions. Sometimes you're in a room and you know you're with people who are in over their head, there was none of that. So I think we'll probably see, just from the people in the room, we'll probably see about 15 proposals. Board of Supervisors wants the contract before them no later than the first meeting in December.
Question: As you mentioned, Chris (Sheaf) said last time that his high end figure was 2.2 million people. Now you've mentioned this notion of the water budget that will support the natural systems. Do you know what the population figure is in connection with that?
Maeveen: There is a study on the water budget for the natural system. We analyzed it and put it into a study that you'll see in 1999, it's on your disk, for Army Corps, and then one of the early riparian studies includes water budget for the natural system. And we have it all on one graphic, I can bring that to the next meeting. But not only can you translate it to population, you can translate it to number of golf courses, number of, so you understand these tradeoffs.
Transfer of Development Rights
History and Possible Use in the SDCP
Discussion:
Negotiation of Mitigation Ratios
Framing of the Issues
Discussion:
Issues for future meeting agendas
Discussion:
Call to the Public:
Meeting Adjourned at 9:00 pm