Jeff Martin, a local property developer, had a guest column in
the June 24 Dispatch in which he put forth his view that the Santa
Clara Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP), recently rejoined by the
Gilroy City Council, was not worth the fees.
Dear Editor,

Jeff Martin, a local property developer, had a guest column in the June 24 Dispatch in which he put forth his view that the Santa Clara Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP), recently rejoined by the Gilroy City Council, was not worth the fees.

I certainly don’t blame a businessman for paying attention to his bottom line but to make good decisions society as a whole needs to reframe these issues in the larger context of the natural world.

Whether we like it or not our health and prosperity is absolutely dependent on the health and prosperity of the natural world around us. Without a healthy natural environment around us – we perish.

Most people understand this. Most people also understand that the cumulative impact of our activities is hacking away at nature’s vitality at an ever accelerating pace. The question then becomes how to best insure our collective survival.

In 1973 when the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was passed it was thought that the best approach was to focus on threatened and endangered species. It quickly became apparent that this approach had serious flaws. It is not surprising that the development community found it outrageous that the presence of a solitary critter could halt a vital project, but environmental groups also had reservations about the new law.

Species do not survive or perish in isolation. They exist and depend on the natural habitat interwoven around them. Species cannot be protected without conserving the natural systems that they live in. So, both sides of the argument agreed that it was more effective to focus on endangered species habitat and thus the win-win solution of Habitat Conservation Plans was established in the 1982 amendment to the ESA.

It is important to understand that the Santa Clara HCP takes this same approach by using land cover types as a proxy for both habitat impacts and habitat conservation. This is not an unreasonable approach.

Even if land of a particular natural cover type is currently unoccupied by a species of interest, it could still provide much needed suitable habitat at a future time for population migration, other life cycle stages or roaming corridors. So, on many levels the development of suitable but unoccupied habitat does impact the species we are trying to protect and therefore should contribute to impact mitigation.

The one major refinement on this basic approach in our plan is to put a greater habitat value, i.e. higher impact fees, on land more remote from existing urban development.

This approach should encourage compact and contiguous urban development and help preserve more remote natural lands. It’s not a perfect approach but it’s cheaper, easier and arguably more effective than trying to focus on individual organisms.

So, my question to Jeff Martin has to be that if you don’t like the approach of the proposed Santa Clara Habitat Conservation Plan what approach would you use to strike a healthy balance between the natural and man-made worlds? Or do you not care if your profits are at the expense of our collective survival?

David Collier, Retired Software Engineer, Former Gilroy Planning Commissioner and

current HCP Stakeholder Committee member

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