Ensure a good HCP for Santa Clara County
Posted April 22, 2004 / Updated July 21, 2005

• What's happening    
• How a good Habitat Conservation Plan could help
• Unclear procedures and uncertain protections   
• What you can do   

We need your help to improve a planning process that could help protect endangered species if done well, or sell out the environment if done poorly. Please urge the City of San Jose and the Habitat Conservation Plan program manager to resist political pressure to downplay impacts on endangered species, especially the pollution impacts on endangered serpentine soil habitat.

Read CGF's Feb. 3, 2005 letter to the City and the HCP manager.
Read the January 2005 article in the Gilroy Dispatch.
Read CGF's April 2004 letter to the City and to Fish and Wildlife.

What's happening
A number of agencies, including the City of San Jose, promised to submit a countywide HCP application by 2006 in exchange to getting approval for the Highway 101 widening and the Bailey interchange construction - construction that is necessary for the development of Coyote Valley. Because HCP planning is a long-term process, it's clear that this deadline will not be met.

It is crucial that the agencies do not compound this mistake by following a process that provides for inadequate public participation, or one that fails to cover endangered and threatened species impacted by development in Santa Clara County.

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How a good Habitat Conservation Plan could help
Habitat Conservation Plans are meant to demonstrate that local agencies have adequately planned to protect endangered species.

Federal laws require that local agencies minimize and mitigate any harm to endangered species caused by development that these agencies allow. HCPs are meant to show the Fish and Wildlife Service that local agencies have adequately planned to protect the endangered species (a parallel program also exists under California state law).

The proposed HCP for Santa Clara County may regulate impacts to fish like steelhead and salmon; to amphibians and reptiles like red-legged frogs and western pond turtles; and to entire threatened habitats like the serpentine soils found on Coyote Ridge, home to endangered plants and butterflies. The serpentine soil habitat in particular could benefit from a good HCP: car exhaust fertilizes non-native grasses on Coyote Ridge, driving out endangered plants and butterflies. Well-managed cattle grazing under a good HCP will remove the grasses and leave native plants.

The potential for benefiting species in Santa Clara County is there, but whether we end up with a good HCP is still to be determined.

Unclear procedures and uncertain protections
While state law requires the planning for the HCP to include some open process, it is not yet clear how much input environmental groups and the public will have.

Equally important, agency officials have not yet decided whether to protect serpentine habitat, based on the clearly incorrect suggestion that the habitat is not being harmed by all the pollution created by County projects. Omitting these serpentine species vastly reduces the HCP's value and increases the likelihood that its purpose is to eliminate ESA protections in return for inadequate mitigation.

What you can do

1. Ask San Jose and the HCP manager to conduct a sound process.
Please join Committee for Green Foothills (read our letter of Feb. 3, 2005 here) in asking San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales and the San Jose City Council, as well as the HCP program manager to resist political pressure to downplay impacts on endangered species, especially the pollution impacts on endangered serpentine soil habitat.

Mayor Ron Gonzales
Santa Clara County Planning Office
801 North First Street, Rm. 600
San Jose, CA 95110    Fax (408) 277-3868
Email mayoremail@sanjoseca.gov

Contact information for individual City Council members is available here.

Ken Schreiber
Program Manager, Santa Clara Valley HCP / NCCP
70 Hedding Street, East Wing, 7th Floor
San Jose, California 95110
Fax (408) 295-1613
Email ken.schreiber@pln.sccgov.org


Finally, please fax or email a copy of your message to us, to help us track our efforts on this issue: Fax (650) 968-8341.

2. Learn more.
Read CGF's February 3, 2005 letter to the City and the HCP manager here.
Read CGF's letter to the City and to Fish and Wildlife here.
Read our Spring 2003 newsletter article about the HCP process.
Read our Fall 2002 newsletter article about threats to native habitats in Santa Clara County.
Read our Summer 2002 newsletter article about the importance of Coyote Ridge, one of the areas that could be protected by a good HCP.
Check out our Activist's Toolbox for links to other resources about HCPs.

3. Support Committee for Green Foothills.
Become a CGF member or make a donation.

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