Desert plan shifts focus to habitat to cut costs

But their plan to put more emphasis on monitoring the health of the habitats they'll be protecting than the vulnerable species living in them is still going to cost county taxpayers nearly $1.5 million annually by the end of the next decade.

The estimate comes in the latest and most crucial draft of the county's proposed multispecies habitat-conservation plan, a key document aimed at turning much of the broader desert conservation plan into reality.

The monitoring is essential to determine if the plan is working properly, said County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry, who has shepherded the conservation plan into being from its infancy a decade ago.

"You have to have statistical information to determine if the investment you make is achieving the goal you desire," Huckelberry said. "The monitoring plan is more than a bunch of paper. It's a real-world application aimed at meeting our primary goal: ensuring that a full spectrum of species are conserved in perpetuity."

The lack of an effective monitoring program has hurt many other habitat-conservation plans around the country, said Brian Powell, a biologist who has led the county's efforts to devise a monitoring program.

Monitoring is legally required under the federal law that allows local governments to do these plans as a way to balance development and species protection in rapidly growing urban areas.

The other plans have been hurt partly because they are "bare bones" and emphasize individual species monitoring over watchdogging the health of the broader habitat, Powell said.

But monitoring the health of the Sonoran Desert's cacti, grasslands and riverfront vegetation is a big factor that will drive up the annual costs of the overall plan by 2019.

Over the next decade, the total cost of monitoring the land and species, managing the open space the county buys and leases, and enforcing the county's riparian-habitat law — among other expenses — will be about $40 million, according to the just-released fifth draft of the county's proposed habitat-conservation plan.

That is the draft that will go to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for approval and will also be open to public review over the next two months.

In that plan's first year of existence — 2010 — the annual cost would be $2.9 million. It would rise to $4.7 million annually by 2019.

Annual monitoring costs will rise from about $383,000 in 2010 to about $1.4 million in 2019.

The costs of managing the land — controlling buffelgrass and other invasive species, restoring riparian areas, preventing illegal dumping, and operating ranches, for example — are higher than the monitoring, at $1.7 million in 2010 and $2.3 million in 2019. That's not as fast, percentagewise, as the expected jump in monitoring costs.

But the management budget is likely to rise beyond current estimates as the county keeps buying more properties for the plan, the new report says.

Still, the two Republicans on the county Board of Supervisors, who have long prided themselves as being fiscal watchdogs, remain enthusiastic supporters of the Sonoran Desert plan in general, as well as the new monitoring plan.

"I expected the costs to be higher, although nearly double the current cost, I'm a little disappointed at that," said Supervisor Ray Carroll, whose district includes much of the land that the county has bought for conservation in the far Southeast and South sides.

"But the environment is very important to me. I've been for the conservation plan from the beginning, and I'm not going to abandon it," Carroll continued. "I'm also concerned — as is any taxpayer in economically difficult times — to review the numbers, to try to get the most bang for the buck in the maintenance and operating costs of the plan."

The costs are fairly small and incremental when you consider the broader investment the county is making in its future, said Supervisor Ann Day, who represents the Catalina Foothills and much of the Northwest Side.

"This is about economic development and keeping Pima County sustainable," said Day, because the conservation plan is supposed to remove many legal obstacles to development of land not formally set aside.

This will help not only private developers but also county road work and other infrastructure projects, she said.

By not having to prepare detailed endangered-species reviews for each road and bridge built in a sensitive area, "it should save us money," Day said of the conservation plan.

But Steve Emerine, a public relations consultant and a columnist for Inside Tucson Business, said it makes no sense during this severe recession for the county to be buying vacant land and spending increasingly large sums protecting and monitoring it.

"I think residents of Pima County would prefer to see more money go into law enforcement, transportation and other needed services rather than spending it on maintenance of vacant land," said Emerine, a longtime critic of the conservation plan.

"The county is laying off employees and talking about how tight things are, but on the other hand they are proposing to do new things with vacant land," Emerine said.

The watchdog Pima Association of Taxpayers has always had divided views within its membership on open-space issues. Its ex-president and secretary, Mary Schuh, has been dubious about open-space buys because they take private land off the property-tax rolls.

The group's current president, John Kromko, supports open-space purchases, saying, "When we look back someday, we'll be glad we set aside some of this land."

But he and Schuh agree that the costs of buying, managing and monitoring the land are excessive.

"Often, people get carried away at what they do," Kromko said. "It's not their money. It seems like free money, Monopoly money to them.

"If you or I, an individual, were buying this, I think they would be a lot more hard-nosed about the conditions they bought it at and the costs," Kromko added.

Carolyn Campbell, an environmentalist, said the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection is very pleased with the new monitoring plan because it has a good balance between individual species and habitat.

The county's plan to emphasize monitoring habitat over species puts it on the same course as the broader conservation plan. That plan has proposed to protect 36 vulnerable species. The principal method has been to try to assure that the county protects the wide range of habitats where those species live.

One reason the county prefers habitat to species monitoring is that individual plants and animals have a very complex reaction to different environmental pressures that aren't always easy to track, said Powell, of the county's Office of Conservation, Science and Environmental Policy.

"With birds, if something isn't right in one area, they move to another," Powell said.

Second, the county doesn't have the money to keep an eye on every one of the 36 species in the plan, he said. "We have to be very selective in the things that we monitor."

Habitats tend to vary and change less over time, while individual species populations can fluctuate greatly even due to natural causes, Powell said. "That translates to more samples and higher cost" for monitoring species, he said.

Powell added, however, that some habitats can be expensive to monitor — such as the amount of water in a river or the quality of that water.

"It varies. It's that link between species and habitat features that we are trying to work on," he said.

Finally, it can be difficult to monitor changes in individual species just because their numbers can vary quite often, the biologist added.

In explaining the time it's taken to develop the plan, Powell said the county needs to make sure it will really be able to detect changes in the landscape.

two-day series

• Tuesday: Pima County's habitat conservation plan at a glance. Find it online at azstarnet.com if you missed it.

• Today: How much county taxpayers will spend to monitor habitats and ecosystems.