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New salamander, salmon plans raise concerns

BUILDERS, VINTNERS SAY PROPOSALS WOULD CAUSE DELAYS, IRRIGATION SHORTAGE

SANTA ROSA – Federal regulators released a new process for streamlining assessment of construction projects in the habitat of the California tiger salamander and endangered plants in central Sonoma County, but a group of local homebuilders and property owners contends that key changes could significantly add delays and cost to projects.

Meanwhile, state water regulators fielded questions from a packed house of winegrape growers and other users of water from North Coast streams. The concern was over provisions in a draft water rights policy thought to severely limit when irrigation and frost-protection ponds built in fish-frequented waterways can be filled and whether they can be used at all.

The new document addressing the salamander issue is called a programmatic biological opinion and alters one crafted in 1998 but doesn’t displace the hard-fought 2005 Santa Rosa Plain Conservation Strategy that local government officials are working to implement.

Homebuilders are concerned that the document by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service on the endangered salamander and flowers would require builders to wait until the protected species have healthy populations on set-aside property before project construction could begin. In addition, they worry that a requirement for a greater number of preserved vernal pools for salamander breeding would lead to a wider area of protected land.

“Most of the people I work with understand the issue that we need to recover the species, but they wonder if a plant is not on their site how can they be required to mitigate for it and required to have success before they can move on to construction,” said Carolyn Wasem, an environmental regulation consultant for several major builders and property owners. “Time is a lot of money for these guys.”

About 75 people, including biological consultants, mitigation bankers and homebuilders, packed into a Feb. 5 workshop by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service on the new programmatic biological opinion for dealing with the species.

The wildlife service’s programmatic biological opinion allows public works departments or builders to mitigate for any effect on habitat of the salamander, Burke’s goldfield, Sonoma sunshine and Sebastopol meadowfoam via coordination with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which regulates wetlands, and the state Fish & Game Department, which also protects the species.

A major change from the 1998 version of the document is the requirement that any single-project mitigation, which builders may set up for their own uses versus buying credits from a public mitigation bank, establish habitat for Burke’s goldfield and Sonoma sunshine flowers before construction can begin.

The previous approach called for creation of habitat, but it resulted in populations of the flowers declining on mitigation land, biological opinion chief author Vincent Griego said at the workshop. The many-flowered navarretia was dropped from the programmatic document because the sites are so isolated a project-by-project approach is preferred, according to a regulator.

Meanwhile, the North Coast wine industry was troubled about the draft North Coast Instream Flows Policy soon after the State Water Resources Control Board released it in the closing days of 2007. Wineries and grapegrowers convinced the water board to push back the Feb. 19 deadline for comments to May 1 and more than 100 crammed into a Feb. 6 workshop in Santa Rosa on the proposed policy.

“We’ve had water-availability experts read it, but when you cut through the scientific aspects, the bottom line is that there won’t be much water available, particularly for smaller users and wineries,” said Skip Spaulding of Farella Braun & Martel’s environmental law group. “There could be 700 to 800 applications affected and not only applications but also holders of existing water rights with applications for a modification or a diversion, which vineyards need from time to time.”

The Legislature in 2004 directed the water board to develop the instream flows policy for the North Coast to reduce the impact of obstructions such as instream reserviors and leave enough water for endangered coho, Chinook and steelhead fish to migrate to and from spawning streams in parts of Humboldt, Mendocino and Napa counties and all of Sonoma and Marin counties.

In a note to clients before the workshop, Mr. Spaulding wrote that “if the board adopts the proposed policy without changes, it is entirely possible that legal action might ensue.”

One of the most troubling portions of the nearly 900-page draft policy, according to Mr. Spaulding, involves the requirement to leave more water in the upper parts of tributaries during the dry summer months as well as flood periods during winter rains, limiting storage for reservoirs in the best spawning streams with the least water flow to a few days a year.

Hopland-based U.C. Berkeley environmental scientist Adina Merenlender, who has developed a model for upper-watershed flows, said the proposed limited diversion window will just make property owners use groundwater or riparian water rights rather than undertake a study of steam flows.

Another major issue for water users is the requirement to install passive or high-tech fish passage systems on in-stream dams, at a projected cost of $300,000 to $3 million, or remove them all together for key spawning streams.

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