Heralded program helps restore park

Deirdre Newman

When C.J. Segerstrom & Sons applied for permits to box in about 2,000

feet of the Greenville-Banning Channel behind the IKEA store for its

Home Ranch project, it had to compensate for eliminating wetlands in

the channel.

It did so at Fairview Park.

Through a program set up and coordinated by the city, developers

and public agencies that need to offset the environmental effects of

their projects can do so by either restoring parts of Fairview Park

themselves or paying into a fund for restoration of the park. The

compensation requirements are handed down from agencies like the

Regional Water Quality Control Board and the U.S. Army Corps of

Engineers.

The Fairview Park Mitigation Bank Program was honored in May for

its creative design with an outstanding planning award from the

Orange County Chapter of the American Planning Assn. The program will

now be entered into the state awards competition.

The program is mutually beneficial to developers and Fairview

Park, said Paul Freeman, spokesman for C. J. Segerstrom & Sons.

“I think it’s a good program,” Freeman said. “It’s really an

effort to leverage the development of some properties that are

already in a development area to help restore natural habitat in the

context of parks or wildlife quarters or whatever, where the whole

idea is to set aside large enough areas that really are meaningful in

terms of biodiversity.”

Fairview Park is 208 acres. The area west of Placentia Avenue is

slated to be restored to its native habitat, which includes coastal

bluff scrub, vernal pools and a riparian zone along the existing

Placentia Drain.

The mitigation bank program was initiated by Development Services

Director Don Lamm and Fairview Park Plan Administrator Ron Molendyk

as a means of producing more money to finish the restoration of

Fairview Park, Molendyk said. To fully complete the restoration west

of Placentia, the cost -- which includes construction and five-year

maintenance, as required by state and federal agencies -- would be

about $10 million, Molendyk said.

The agencies that establish the mitigation requirements usually

require compensation at a 3:1 ratio, so if an entity impacts one acre

of wetlands, it typically has to restore three acres to compensate,

Molendyk said.

The mitigation fees that developers and public agencies could

choose to pay include the value of the land, restoration costs and

the five-year maintenance. If the entities chose to do the mitigation

themselves, a biologist hired by the city oversees the work, Molendyk

said.

To compensate for the environmental effects of boxing in the

Greenville-Banning Channel, C.J. Segerstrom & Sons had to fulfill two

obligations. The company met one obligation, set by the U.S. Army

Corps of Engineers, by restoring about an acre of vernal pool and

vernal marsh by Banning Place, which is located behind the Estancia

High School athletic fields.

Vernal pools are seasonally flooded depressions found on ancient

earth that have a solid layer like claypan or volcanic basalt. This

layer enables the pools to hold water for a longer time than the

surrounding elevated land. The pools often fill and empty several

times during the rainy season and dry up completely at other times.

Only plants and animals that have adapted to this cycle can

survive in vernal pools over time. These animals include western

toads, black-bellied slender salamanders and fairy shrimp. The

endangered San Diego County fairy shrimp inhabit the vernal pools

that C.J. Segerstrom & Sons restored.

The benefit of the Segerstroms doing the mitigation themselves is

that they used a company whose expertise was in restoring vernal

pools, Molendyk said.

“You have to go down to a certain depth, but you don’t want to

damage the clay liner,” Molendyk said. “If you penetrate the liner,

it could affect the viability of the pool.”

The company also paid the city $100,000 to help restore a riparian

habitat along the Placentia Drain. The Placentia Drain project

involves both restoration and enhancement of water quality, Molendyk

said. The enhancement would be carried out by creating a program to

pump water up to the drain and creating wetlands, thereby providing

water to the vernal pools to encourage more habitat and create a

natural filtering system, Molendyk explained.

There are also 44 acres near Swan Drive that are ripe for

restoration, which could be achieved through mitigation efforts,

Molendyk said. One of the other benefits to these efforts is that if

they generate enough revenue to finish the restoration in the park,

then the city will be able to do a better job of maintaining it,

Molendyk added.