Watershed-wide Ecosystem Planning:
Regional HCP and NCCP
As this page is posted for review, issues shown here should be dealt with before any page is developed for final posting on the SRWP public site.
NOTE: County-wide HCP and NCCP planning has been undertaken by all the counties from Santa Clara through the Bay Area and up through the Delta through Sacramento to Placer County and Lake Tahoe. Many of these efforts are collaborating at jurisdictional boundaries.
Using the HCP and NCCP approach watershed-wide is one way to get an in-depth assessment of the ecosystems in the watershed … riparian systems, wildlife migration corridors, flyway connections, etc.
Before developing this section, the SRWP Board should determine whether the organization should recommend this approach. Implications for rural counties are costly, as a starter. It is a political hot potato in rural counties, even a tug-of-war in counties like Placer. It has been adopted by all those counties essentially because the level of development is so great that the ecosystems were battered to the point of collapse in many cases, and development would cease if the impacts and mitigations were not in place. Essentially, the development community, however reluctantly, are forced into compliance, and the counties do the heavy lifting with the HCP and NCCP. Will rural counties do this pro-actively? Is it the right approach for rural counties? Inevitable anyway?
