July 2013 - Parks & Recreation - 40

M I T I G AT I O N B A N K I N G

threatened natural streams and floodplains in parks while fully paying the
cost of restoration and providing new
funds for long-term management and
stewardship.

A true public-private partnership: (from left
to right) Don Seaborn, partner at Angler;
Lee Goodwin, partner at Angler; Maureen
Caddigan, PWC Potomac district supervisor; Debbie Andrew, director of PWC
Department of Parks and Recreation; and
Marc Aveni, chief of environmental services
at PWC Department of Public Works

What is new in the mitigation landscape is that park and recreation agencies, already respected as long-term
stewards of public lands, are being
viewed by mitigation project sponsors as ideal potential partners for
the creation and development of new
mitigation banks, particularly those
focused on restoring and protecting smaller streams and waterways.
New mitigation banks, privately built
on public lands, can allow park and
recreation agencies to achieve multiple restoration goals simultaneously,
including restoring environmentally
damaged lands for which no funding
would otherwise be available, permanently protecting such lands from
future damage through perpetual
conservation easements and gaining
new revenues for management, conservation and education from royalties gained on the sale of mitigation
credits. One of the most attractive
features to public landowners is that
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Parks & Recreation

all of the restoration can be achieved
at no cost to taxpayers. In fact, some
mitigation banks can generate significant revenues for park and recreation
agencies that can be used for management of other conservation lands,
education or other public purposes.
Recognizing the potential for public
park and recreation agencies nationwide, NRPA began a pilot demonstration program, " Parks for Mitigation, "
in 2012 in partnership with a number of
NRPA member agencies in the Maryland-Virginia-District of Columbia
region in cooperation with an environmental design and construction firm,
Angler Environmental, which is based
in Manassas, Virginia. The goal of the
pilot demonstration program is to assist
the participating agencies to successfully permit, develop and manage demonstration mitigation banks, and in the
process, use the lessons learned to create
the tools, resources and training for other park and recreation agencies across
the country to develop their own stream
mitigation banks in their own parks.
This is revolutionary thinking for
parks and recreation. If successful, it
holds the potential to be an entirely
new way for agencies to permanently
conserve environmentally damaged or

| J U LY 2 0 1 3 | W W W. N R PA . O R G

Mitigation Banking 101
As the American landscape has been
fragmented and developed at an astonishing pace over the last 25 years
for residential, commercial and industrial purposes, as well as by the development of roads, bridges, utilities
and other infrastructure, there has
been a concentrated federal and state
effort to protect the quality and character of remaining aquatic natural resources and to replace those that are
damaged or lost in the development
process. This long-term effort, guided
by landmark federal legislation such
as the Clean Water Act, the Rivers
and Harbors Act, and other laws has
led to the development of a number
of creative methods of protecting riparian forests, wetlands and stream
valleys. Today, there are about 1,000
mitigation banks protecting just over
one million acres of wetlands, riparian forest buffers and streams.
In 2008, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) issued a new rule concerning " Compensatory Mitigation for Losses of Aquatic
Resources. " According to the National
Mitigation Banking Association, this
rule laid the groundwork for national
consistency in the establishment, use
and operational criteria for all forms
of compensatory mitigation, including
mitigation banking. While the expanded rule was intended to improve the
planning, implementation and management of compensatory mitigation
projects for the loss of aquatic resources in critical watersheds, it also opened
the way for expansion of the use of
stream mitigation banks as a means of
providing such compensation. Part of
July 2013 - Parks & Recreation

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