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Land Use Lowdown
The Bay-Delta region will swell by over a million people within the next two decades, and resulting urban growth and land uses changes will have major impacts on Estuary health. How the 12-county region's 111 local governments can work together with regional, state and federal government, as well as with private interests, to manage growth in an environmentally and economically sustainable manner is the focus of 15 actions in the land use section of the S.F. Estuary Project's CCMP for the Bay and Delta.
It is three years since this consensus-based Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan - developed by a 100-member committee drawn from diverse government and private interests - was published. This story is the first in a series to examine a specific section of the CCMP to highlight progress made toward implementation. While not all of the progress described below was carried out with CCMP implementation specifically in mind, it does all fit within the spirit of this wide-reaching plan.
The first action in the plan recommends that local General Plans should incorporate watershed, wetland and stream protection and seek to reduce pollutants in runoff. Santa Clara County was one of the first to do just that. The county's Bill Shoe says three things helped get key CCMP strategies incorporated to the county's General Plan: timing - a presentation from Estuary Project staff to the county's Board of Supervisors at just the time when the General Plan was being revised; emphasis on the part of CCMP presenters on those elements most relevant to Santa Clara County; and interest from county staff in developing a more regional perspective for the General Plan's conservation elements. The new planning approach is already producing results, with a comprehensive countywide watershed evaluation underway, with the reinstatement of a permitting process for building within certain watershed areas, and with a new county-sponsored roundtable designed to foster consensus about what should be done to protect the county's streams.
Other cities and counties are weaving the CCMP into their land use management as a result of the Association of Bay Area Government's (ABAG) subregional planning efforts. Subregional planning invites several cities and counties, for example, to work together to meet overlapping needs for roads, services, habitat loss mitigation and the like. In addition, it often offers a more appropriate scale for watershed- and other ecosystem-based land use management initiatives than do single jurisdictions. In 1994, ABAG published a Menu of Subregional Land Use Policies that includes sample natural wetland protection, watershed-based planning and compact growth policies explicitly called for in the CCMP's land use section.
With pilot grants from ABAG and the menu of options on the table, both the Tri-Valley area (six cities and two counties) and Sonoma County have published consensus-based subregional plans including CCMP elements. Sonoma's plan, for example, includes a commitment to coordinating best management practices for stormwater, to developing a waterways master plan to identify and save streams and wetlands, and to protecting contiguous "sustainable" habitat areas through mitigation banking and other means.
ABAG is not the only regional agency to weigh in on the land use action front. The S.F. Regional Board is reorganizing by watershed and working in Coyote Creek, for example, with three municipalities and stakeholders on a pilot local government pollution prevention project that includes land use measures. The S.F. Bay Commission is partnering with cities and counties on the North Bay rim - an area uniquely endowed with 40,000 acres of undeveloped historic baylands - to develop a legally enforceable blueprint for land use and wetland enhancement. The new Delta Protection Commission, meanwhile, produced its region's first comprehensive land use and resource management plan in 1995. The plan includes CCMP-style elements designed to safe-guard water quality, improve levee maintenance and protect important farmlands and sensitive wildlife areas.
Beyond these policy level efforts, there has been much on-the-ground progress on the CCMP-emphasized watershed protection front. Public-private watershed planning and restoration programs are underway for Napa's Huichica Creek, the East Bay's Alameda and San Leandro creeks, Marin's Corte Madera Creek and the four-county-spanning Cosumnes River, to name only a few. Such programs involve everything from reducing runoff from cow pastures, timber cuts and neighboring cities to planting trees, removing trash, monitoring illegal discharges and restoring salmon habitat. Indeed watershed planning has reached as high up into the Estuary's headwaters as Deer Creek, where some of the last hold outs of spring-run salmon are threatened by ag diversions, forest cuts and dam proposals. To minimize these impacts while maintaining timber and farming business, landowners and environmentalists along this Tehama and Lassen county creek are undertaking watershed-scale planning.
Other, more specific, CCMP actions have also been taken. One calls for new decision-making tools to guide future land use planning and to this end, UC Berkeley now has GIS maps of the region's creeks, watersheds, wetlands and other features available on computer overlays. Another action calls for guidelines for site development to prevent impacts on waterways, such as the City of San Jose's new creek protection policy, for example. The policy recommends 100-foot setbacks for land uses along creeks and provides clear guidelines on toxics runoff control, restoration and planting procedures and building orientation. Another action calls for market-based incentives for private sector efforts to enhance the Estuary's health, such as the streamlined permitting offered to developers who meet Yolo County habitat conservation guidelines as described earlier. Still another actions call for new educational tools, such as the new guidebook on watershed, stormwater and land use management for local government to be published this March.
Less progress has been made at the state level on CCMP actions calling for integration of protection of the Estuary with other state land use initiatives and for amendments to the California Environmental Quality Act Guidelines for general plans.
A more comprehensive review of CCMP implementation progress on all fronts, including the land use arena, is now underway and slated for publication at the October 1996 State of the Estuary conference.
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