NATURAL RESOURCE PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT

ISSUES

As the Bay Area has grown, so have concerns for maintaining air and water quality, protecting open space streams and wetlands, restoring the health of the Bay, ensuring the availability of land for parks and wildlife preserves and retaining agricultural activities.

OBJECTIVES

There are six main objectives in protecting natural resources and environmental quality:

  1. Preserve environmental resources in order to maintain and enhance ecological health and diversity of plant and animal communities.
  2. Preserve economically productive lands and waterways, including crop and grazing land, forests, and fisheries.
  3. Ensure availability of open lands for public purposes, including recreation and watershed protection.
  4. Create and enhance community identity through protection of community separators, hillsides, ridge lines and viewsheds, riparian corridors and key landscape features.
  5. Use conservation of open land to guide needed and anticipated new development into areas where it is best provided for, avoiding areas with high risk of landslide, flood, fire or other natural hazard.
  6. Preserve and enhance air and water quality.


POLICIES

The following subregional policies are intended to improve natural resource protection and management.		 Choices given for Policies


CONSERVATION OF ECOLOGICAL RESOURCE
  1. Inventory and encourage preservation of significant plant communities, aquatic resources and wildlife habitats and movement corridors as well as significant historic, visual and cultural resources, including views, landmarks and archaeological sites.
  2. Carry out requirements of state and federal legislation protecting endangered species.
  3. Encourage efficient use of existing water supplies, including conservation by urban, agricultural and industrial users, and use of reclaimed water.
  4. Support implementation of the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan for the San Francisco Bay - Delta Estuary.
  5. Pursue programs which identify and protect the availability of significant rock, sand, gravel and other mineral resource areas and which balance their use with ecological conservation objectives.
  6. Pursue the use of conservation easements, density transfer or purchase using in-lieu fees and dedications in order to preserve open space that cannot otherwise be protected.
  7. Establish a non-profit land trust to acquire and preserve open space.
  8. Pursue all methods of acquiring land for parks, permanent easements, and open space preserves that contribute to the subregional open space network from state and federal governments, individuals, and foundations.
  9. Develop watershed management strategies to protect, enhance and restore wetlands and riparian areas, and reduce pollutants and runoff within the estuary.
  10. Promote land use, design, and development practices that minimize pollution and manage the flow of stormwater and urban runoff into the Bay and its tributaries. Dynamic
  11. Permanently preserve a continuous system of open space adjacent to urban growth boundaries, through planning enforcement, joint agreements and/or acquisition.
  12. Develop proposal for new funding for special open space acquisition program considering bonds, parcel, sales and other taxes and fees.
  13. Require dedications of all lands needed for maintaining and improving animal movement corridors and establish zoning to ensure long term viability of large scale plant and animal habitats. 1
  14. Require conservation and, where necessary, restoration of all riparian and wetland habitats to support historic levels of wildlife and plants.
  15. Implement land use and transportation patterns and practices that protect, enhance, and restore the Estuary’s open waters, adjacent wetlands, uplands habitats, and tributary waterways.
PRESERVATION OF AGRICULTURAL RESOURCES
  1. Retain land in large, contiguous blocks of sufficient size and quality to enable economically viable grazing or agriculture.
  2. Discourage actions which would preclude future agricultural use on agricultural lands not currently used for farming, but which have soils or other characteristics that make them suitable for farming.
  3. Protect and enhance the economic viability of agricultural land by: facilitating preservation agreements, conservation easements, and transfer of development rights; establishing right to farm ordinances; and undertaking public education about agriculture. Dynamic
  4. Identify and protect any watershed lands that are part of an agricultural production area.
  5. Define agricultural production zones for all significant crop and grazing uses and permanently prohibit any development or subdivision of land in those zones.
  6. Establish firm urban growth boundaries and require the establishment of buffer zones in all developed areas next to agricultural production zones, in order to reduce urban-farm conflicts and to clearly signify where urban development ends.
  7. Maintain a viable agricultural land market by limiting future development on agricultural land to uses and structures necessary for agricultural operations.
  8. Prevent the transfer of water resources from agricultural parcels to urban uses when it will threaten viable agricultural use.
  9. Prevent overdrafting of groundwater.

PROTECTION OF COMMUNITY CHARACTER
  1. Encourage actions which maintain the integrity of hillside areas as major scenic and natural resources by limiting development to low-intensity uses compatible with open space.
  2. Direct future urban development away from areas that have steep hillsides and that are adjacent to major water courses.
  3. Define and establish long term planning goals that encourage large scale urban separators between communities (which have not already grown together).
  4. Preserve hillside areas of at least 15% average slope by discouraging higher density development, encouraging clustering, requiring open space preservation and ensuring the protection of natural features such as trees, creeks, knolls, ridgelines and rock outcroppings.
  5. Establish a dedication and acquisition program to acquire community separator lands.

AIR QUALITY
  1. Support the Air District’s development of improved ambient air quality monitoring capabilities and the establishment of standards, thresholds and rules to more adequately address the air quality impacts of proposed project plans and proposals.
  2. Encourage modes of transportation that minimize impacts on air quality.
  3. Adopt air quality policies and programs and integrate them into local general plans and implementation mechanisms.
  4. Promote ancillary employee services, such as child care, restaurants, banks, or convenience markets at major employment centers to reduce vehicle trips.
  5. Require pedestrian-, bicycle-, and transit-oriented features in new development and redevelopment projects.
  6. Discourage single-occupant vehicle trips through parking supply and pricing controls or other similar measures.
  7. Preserve rights-of-way and land for station sites along future transit corridors and secure adequate funding for transit agencies in the subregion to make transit a viable alternative to the automobile.
  8. Encourage compact, city-centered development featuring a mix of uses that locates homes near jobs and services to reduce vehicle trips and vehicle miles traveled.
WATER QUALITY
  1. Carry out requirements of state and federal legislation protecting wetlands; discourage any filling of wetlands except for small levees, piers or walkways necessary for public access or study of the shoreline or baylands.
  2. Encourage the preservation of adequate vegetative cover and prevent development which increases erosion and sedimentation potential along streams or in unstable soil areas.
  3. Identify, protect and conserve groundwater.
  4. Retain natural riparian and stream-side areas in their natural state to prevent degradation and provide soil percolation, wildlife habitat, aesthetic relief, and recreational uses.
  5. Improve wetlands protection and the management and control of urban runoff into the Bay and its tributaries from public and private sources.
  6. Establish actions which protect water resources by:

    • a. preserving areas with prime soil percolation capabilities and preventing placement of all potential sources of pollution in such areas;
    • b. minimizing sedimentation and erosion through control of grading, quarrying, cutting of trees, vegetation removal, placement of roads and bridges, use of off-road vehicles and animal-related disturbances of soil;
    • c. controlling pollution from land uses producing potentially harmful substances or contaminants;
    • d. preventing establishment of excessive concentrations of septic systems over large land areas and mitigating water quality impacts from existing concentrations; and
    • e. reducing motor vehicle related pollutants in runoff from paved surfaces, and in discharges from stormwater drains.

  7. Enhance and restore wetlands and stream environments.



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cl 07/21/99