County enviro guidebook gets finishing touches

A county committee is finished with its revisions to a guide intended to help builders navigate regulations, and now it’s time for members of the general public as well as federal and state agencies to have their say.

The county started a 45-day public comment period on Wednesday for the now-updated Biological Resources Review Guide. County planning officials also sent copies of the 46-page document and its 187-page appendix to the state Department of Fish and Game, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers, all of which must approve them.

The guide is the newest incarnation of the Tuolumne County Wildlife Handbook, which developers have used for years to make sure their projects conform with local, state and federal environmental rules. It covers protected plants, wildlife and habitats in the area, includes guidelines of how to avoid disturbing those habitats and covers mitigation measures if some disturbances do take place.    

A committee appointed by the county Board of Supervisors worked for months on the guide to try and make it more user-friendly and reduce redundancies.    

Last week, committee chairman and county Supervisor Dick Pland said that more than 90 percent of the revisions had unanimous support.    

“We had a really open-minded, hard-working committee,” Pland said, later adding, “We had some differences of opinion.”    

The updated guide includes easing a number of open-space and mitigation requirements when building in urban areas and/or including affordable housing in a project.    

It also scales back a rule for building in relatively abundant but important habitat spaces known as third-priority resources that requires 20 percent of the entire project site be saved for open space. The revised guide now requires only 20 percent of the third-priority area on the project site be set aside.    

The guide also allows for a developer in some cases to pay a special fee in the place of setting aside third-priority and oak woodland habitat. And it also in some cases allows a developer to get credit for mitigating the impact of a project through “thinning and sanitizing of existing overstocked oak woodland.”    

Rebecca Cremeen, who represented the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center on the committee, agreed with Pland that most of the revisions had unanimous support. But Cremeen on Tuesday told the county Board of Supervisors that she did not support the above changes. She also raised concerns about a revision that allows a developer to build a road 50 percent into an old-growth oak’s drip line if using permeable material.    

“As a package, I really do feel like it’s an overall weakening of wildlife protection,” Cremeen said.    

“If we are going to approve this package, I don’t know whether Fish and Game will be in support of this,” Cremeen later said. “We have a document that they helped develop … and now we’ve changed that significantly.”    

Mark Banks, who sat on the committee representing the Tuolumne County Building Industry Association, said he believes the committee made a number of positive changes to the guide. He pointed to incentives that will encourage affordable housing in the county, and he said a number of measures make it a “more flexible” tool for development. But he said the changes still don’t make it a simple tool to use.    

It is “not something the standard layperson” can use, Banks said.   

“I think we missed our goal there, but I think that may have been a bit of a pipe dream,” he said.    

Developers are not required to use the guide. They can hire a private consultant to do the same job.    

However, Mike Laird of the Community Resources Agency said the vast majority of developers in the county use the guide’s previous incarnations to navigate regulations.    

Laird said the county worked closely with the Army Corps while revising the document, and worked with the state Fish and Game until their contact left the department. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was not nearly as responsive during the process, Laird said.   

“That’s why we’re hopeful by … having the chairman of the Board of Supervisors send a letter to the head of the agencies’ regional offices, we will get a response,” Laird said.    

The final guide will require approval by the Board of Supervisors.    

The updated guide is available for view on the county website, www.co.tuolumne.ca.us by clicking on the Hot Topics link. Call Laird at 533-5633 for more information about the guide and how to submit formal comments.