Regional Advance Mitigation Planning (RAMP)

California’s public agencies spend billions of dollars each year on needed infrastructure projects to meet the growing need for roads, bridges, levees and other facilities. California hosts an extraordinarily rich array of valuable natural communities and ecosystems that provide habitat for rare wildlife, and are the source for Californians’ drinking water and open space for healthy recreation. As California grows, it is imperative that it be done in a manner that protects and enhances the state’s natural resources.

Regional Advance Mitigation Planning (RAMP) incorporates both a regional geographic component and an advance time frame. The regional component will allow state and federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of several planned infrastructure projects at once. The advance time frame will identify regional mitigation opportunities that will satisfy anticipated mitigation requirements early in the project planning and environmental review process, before the projects are in the final stages of approval.

Working together, natural resource and infrastructure agencies can estimate mitigation needs early in the projects’ timelines, avoiding permitting and regulatory delays and allowing public mitigation dollars to stretch further by securing and conserving valuable natural resources on a more economically efficient scale and before related real estate values escalate. Since we launched this effort three years ago, much has been accomplished:

• Federal and state agencies signed a Memorandum of Agreement that committed themselves to the goals of regional advance mitigation, to design a framework or program that would implement a RAMP and participate in a pilot project to test the concept.
• We are drafting documents that outline the goals of RAMP and create a policy and financial framework for how a program could work, based on the work on the pilot, policy research and other models.
• And legislation was introduced to establish a Regional Advance Mitigation program in the state (but has yet to pass).

The RAMP Work Group is currently developing a Statewide Framework document intended to convey to lawmakers and agency leaders the goals, benefits, and operational framework of a statewide RAMP initiative. The draft Statewide Framework should be completed by June 2012. Outreach on this document will cover internal agency staff as well as several outside organizations (e.g., County staff, land trust organizations, and non-profits). The Statewide Framework will have a companion document, the RAMP Manual, which will serve as a comprehensive guidance document for planning and implementing regional advance mitigation throughout California. Development of the RAMP Manual will draw from lessons learned during development and completion of an advance mitigation assessment for a pilot region. The first draft of assessment, which will be completed in the spring 2012, will provide a vision for implementing advance mitigation in the pilot region.

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The mission of the Floodway Ecosystem Sustainability Branch is: to achieve long-term improvements to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems; native species populations; ecological processes; and agricultural and environmental stewardship to support a more sustainable flood management system.