Tuesday, December 1, 2015
David Flick, Principal and Founder of Terra Technologies, is proud to announce that the Tulsa District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has approved the nonprofit Terra Foundation’s In-Lieu Fee Stream and Wetland Mitigation Program which will operate throughout central Oklahoma. The initial program service area includes the Oklahoma City metropolitan area and much of the Tulsa metropolitan area as shown below as the area surrounded by a black line. This program area is further subdivided into individual service areas indicated by different hatching patterns. Additional individual service areas may be added in the future.
This in-lieu fee program will greatly increase the mitigation options within Oklahoma, which currently has only one established mitigation bank with a small service area. Terra Technologies assisted the Terra Foundation by writing the Program Instrument for this regional mitigation program which will govern the establishment and operation of multiple centralized wetland and stream mitigation sites. This included analyzing the historical mitigation need in different watersheds within Oklahoma to predict future demand, calculating pricing for wetland mitigation credits and three different kinds of stream mitigation credits across the different real estate markets within Oklahoma, adapting the established mitigation guidelines to be workable for centralized in-lieu fee mitigation, and creating a Compensation Planning Framework for the entire state of Oklahoma. This Compensation Planning Framework summarized the threats to existing aquatic resources, historic loss of aquatic resources, and current aquatic resource conditions for the nine watersheds within Oklahoma and then synthesized that knowledge into aquatic resource goals and objectives for the in-lieu fee program and a prioritization strategy for the acquisition and development of wetland and stream mitigation sites.
In-lieu fee mitigation, like mitigation banking, is a form of centralized mitigation where permittees pay a mitigation provider to produce the needed wetland and/or stream mitigation that compensates for the permittee’s impacts to those habitats. The in-lieu fee mitigation provider then creates a mitigation site that simultaneously satisfies multiple permittees’ obligations, thus creating larger mitigation sites that offer better water quality improvements and wildlife habitat opportunities than if separate small mitigation sites were created. In-lieu fee mitigation differs from mitigation banking in two main regards. First, in-lieu fee mitigation projects can be initiated up to three years after their first credit sale while mitigation bank sites are generally established before or very near the time of their first credit sale. Second, in-lieu fee providers are non-profits or governmental agencies while mitigation bankers are private sector organizations.
For more information about mitigation services, contact your local office of Terra Technologies.
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