San Diego OKs Conservation Plan

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday approved the nation’s most ambitious urban land conservation strategy, designed to protect 85 imperiled species of plants and animals across 900 square miles of Southern California.

The board’s 4-1 vote comes after the City Council approved the plan earlier this year. The plan imposes a system of regulating building in naturally sensitive areas that the Clinton administration hopes will become a model for the rest of the country.

“It is really the largest and most significant planning exercise ever put together on an urban landscape,” U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said in Washington.

Elsewhere in the United States, there are about 400 similar habitat conservation planning areas either established or under consideration.

Affecting tens of thousands of landowners from lush coastal suburbs to the desert environs of the U.S.-Mexico border, the San Diego plan softens the impact of the Endangered Species Act on new development while attempting to protect open space and ensure the survival of wildlife facing extinction along one of the most expensive and fast-growing real estate corridors anywhere.

Wildlife experts believe there are more endangered species in the region covered by the plan than in virtually any other location in the country.

The area covered by the plan includes public and private land and extends from the San Dieguito River Valley on the north to the Mexican Border and from the Pacific Ocean on the west to the inland desert.

The strategy is the product of collaboration between the Clinton administration, Gov. Pete Wilson, the building industry and a number of environmental organizations.

The San Diego office of the Building Industry Assn., the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the League of Conservation Voters and the Alliance for Habitat Conservation--a coalition of landowners and developers--all endorsed the plan during Wednesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.

As approved by the supervisors, about one-quarter of the affected 900-square-mile area would become permanent wildlife preserves for such species as the California gnatcatcher and the San Diego fairy shrimp. The 172,000-acre preserve system would be created through contributions from federal, state and local governments and from property owners seeking to build in the broad area encompassed by the plan.

In return, developers would be assured that they would not be subjected to repeated, future regulations under the Endangered Species Act, relieving them of a concern that has made the act one of the most unpopular environmental laws ever passed.

But the so-called no surprises clause is highly controversial in the view of many environmentalists. They contend that with “no surprises” the government surrenders its authority to regulate property in the future to protect species that become endangered later on.

Without the guarantee, however, Babbitt said that “there is zero incentive for landowners if, year after year, they face the risk of additional, costly regulation.”

Without the power to regulate, Babbitt also said that the government’s ability to intervene in the future on behalf of threatened species will be limited to its ability to buy the land in question.

Without the power to regulate, Babbitt also said that the government’s ability to intervene in the future on behalf of threatened species will be limited to its ability to buy the land in question. In prime real estate markets, including much of Southern California, environmentalists fear that government will seldom be able to afford to buy land where species need to be protected.