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New Nature Banks
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and a room full of leaders from the state and the Bank of America announced the opening of California's first conservation bank in San Diego at a press conference April 7. The 180-acre Carlsbad Highlands Conservation Bank seeks to protect gnatcatcher habitat, not just the gnatcatcher, with contributions from landowners within a 6,000 square-mile area.
The San Diego site fuses the practice of mandatory wetlands mitigation banking and the state's so far mostly theoretical Natural Communities Partnership Planning Act into a multi-species conservation bank. The Resources Agency's Andy McLeod says the state hopes that conservation banks will quicken the pace of both development and wildlife preservation in California. He says the San Diego bank is being eyed as a national template. Under this template, all landowners and agencies in a given area agree to a preservation plan for an entire ecosystem and also to the physical location of a shared conservation bank or refuge, to which all landowners could contribute.
McLeod says the Resources Agency may be willing to open a similar-style conservation bank in the North Natomas development area near Arco Arena in Sacramento, where developers have proposed forming a wildlife conservancy. Development in that area has long been restricted by protections for the Swainson's Hawk, the giant garter snake and wetlands and vernal pools.
"Now that the state has a formal policy for conservation banking, we are hoping landowners like those in the North Natomas area will come forward with proposals to open conservation banks," says McLeod.
Contact: Andy McLeod (916)653-5792
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