Vegetation Treatment Plan Update

By Frank Landis, Conservation Committee Chair

UPDATE: ACTION ALERT FOR CNPS-SD AND OTHERS
 
The Council on Environmental Quality is circulating updates to how the feds will handle Environmental Impact Statements. It is really important that as many people as possible comment on this bad idea by March 10, 2020. Details and directions are below. Thanks for taking the time.

Note that since you will be commenting as a private citizen, not on behalf of CNPS, you can feel free to comment on anything that affects you, including where your water comes from, whether you find government documents readable, and so forth.

To respond CLICK HERE. Thank you in advance!

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The funding requests are unending, but PLEASE contribute to the Endangered Habitats League (https://ehleague.org/donate.html) or Chaparral Institute (https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/save-10-million-acres-of-california-habitat) to fund their lawsuit against CalFire’s Vegetation Treatment Program (VTP). I’ll discuss in detail below why this is such a terrible program and why CNPS is not in the litigation. The critical point is that every environmental group is stretched on funding litigation. If we want them to win battles for you, it’s time to donate. It’s safe to say that they and other groups litigating on environmental issues are getting substantially more of my money than CNPS is.

Now let me explain why this happened. This is from my viewpoint and others will disagree. I’ve got an odd view on relationships, due to my doctoral work on symbioses. When two organisms get together in a close working relationship—mycorrhizae, for example, or mutualistic bacteria—one of the essential features for both partners to cooperate with each other is that each side can effectively punish the other side for attempting to take advantage of them. You may have seen the mathematical version of this, known as “tit for tat.” It may seem paradoxical at first, but extremely successful cooperative relationships in a huge variety of systems are built on enforceable penalties for bad behavior.

Humans, to oversimplify, tend to default to primate dominance structures, where we appease the silverbacks above us in return (hopefully!) for fair treatment. Note there’s no reciprocal penalties here. This often plays out in political access. A politician or bureaucrat might give someone, say an officer in a non-profit, a seat at the table, where they’re listened to and given tasks to perform. In return for continued access, they often prefer to appease rather than oppose.

The problems start when the organization’s interests conflict with the officer’s access. Organizations probably should behavemore like symbionts with agencies, cooperating when possible, but defending their interests when those interests are violated. Officers have to figure out whether their interests, and the interests of the organization, are better served by, say, litigating to stop a program (and losing access temporarily) or having the organization’s interests ignored, but still having that desirable seat at the table.

You’ve probably figured out by now why CNPS is not litigating on the VTP, but here’s my side of the story. Since we all knew the VTP was going to be certified, I tried to get state CNPS to move forward on preparing for litigation. I was told by Greg Suba, then the state conservation director, that because some northern California chapters “tepidly supported the VTP,” he was not going to allow us to sue. CNPS does have a memorandum of understanding with CalFire to perform controlled burns in the Northern Sierras, in conifer forests that need more ground fires. Shortly thereafter, Greg left CNPS to take a job with Sierra Forest Legacy, which is also a signatory to that MOU. State CNPS has stuck with his strategy since. And I have no idea which northern California chapters of CNPS tepidly support the VTP.

Now let me explain why the VTP is such a problem. The program itself has some capacity to do controlled burns and such, but primarily it’s a funding program for other groups. Land managers are supposed to submit their projects to the VTP, and if the projects are consistent with the VTP, they get funded.That’s actually not that problematic, provided the projects avoid causing damage.

The problem is that the VTP was done with a Programmatic Environmental Impact Report (PEIR). If you’ve been reading this column for a while, you know that an EIR is an analysis of the impacts of a single project. A PEIR is what you write when you’ve got a segmented project (like Pacific Highlands Ranch in the Carmel Valley) that’s going to be developed in segments over many years. Some of the impacts are the same for every segment, some are going to be unique to each segment. Since it’s burdensome to repeat the same analysis for each segment, you write a PEIR for the project where you analyze those impacts that are universal and mitigate them. Once this PEIR is in place, each segment can “tier off” the PEIR by referring to the analysis done in the PEIR on those universal impacts. Done properly, PEIRs save a lot of effort.

The VTP PEIR wasn’t done properly. It covers one-third of the state of California, but it’s around 700 pages long, which is a short way of saying there is no analysis of universal impacts. To be a proper PEIR for such a huge area, it would need to be hundreds of thousands of pages long. Moreover, it’s not bounded in time or space, and they don’t know where they will be working. Why? The VTP is primarily a funding program, and they have no idea who will apply for funds. A PEIR analysis is totally the wrong thing for this.

Unfortunately, CalFire doesn’t have much in the way of CEQA expertise on staff (as demonstrated, among other things, by the VTP PEIR). If the VTP goes into effect, they’re going to get hundreds of applications for projects every year, and a few staffers will have to read them all. Supposedly, qualified people will go out on site to review each project. Unfortunately, CalFire has a long history of rubber stamping other CEQA-equivalent documents, like Timber Harvest Plans and funding for fire-safe projects, so I don’t expect them to send anyone out or do adequate review. More likely, they’ll rubber stamp most or allapplications, trusting that the applicant did the proper review. This is implied in the VTP PEIR.

As a result, what is likely to happen is that a landowner, State Parks for example, will apply for VTP money. CNPS members will complain that the project will damage rare native plants and plant habitat. The land owner will say that CalFire has found that their project was covered by the analysis in the VTP PEIR, therefore the damage has already been mitigated. If we disagree, we need to sue to stop them. Litigation costs $50- 100,000 per lawsuit.

There are supposed to be hundreds of VTP projects every year, and some fraction are going to be problematic. We could have sued now and stop this from starting, or we can be overwhelmed with bad land management projects and have little or no way of preventing them. Unfortunately, we decided not to sue.

I do see an alternative that might be a win-win. The problem is the PEIR, not the VTP exactly. As “some northern California CNPS chapters” know, there are certainly situations where CNPS and CalFire can work together. There are likely a lot of projects that, without the PEIR, would require a minimal Negative Declaration (ND) under CEQA, not a full EIR, things like crews doing weed control or those Sierran controlled burns. The problem is the carte blanche given by the PEIR that allows bad projects to get rubberstamped statewide.

My proposal would be for CalFire to scrap the PEIR and turn the VTP strictly into a funding program without a PEIR. Program applicants would be responsible for CEQA review independently under their own lead agencies. In return, CNPS would use all our high quality rare plant, vegetation, and Important Plant Areadata to help CalFire target VTP projects where they’ll do somegood and minimize the damage. This is something CalFire apparently has struggled to do, and they wanted to ignore the problem instead of solve it. However, if a proposed VTP project would cause impacts, it would still require a full CEQA workup, done by the project applicant, not the VTP program. That would take the burden off CalFire, speeding their process.

The mandatory settlement discussion in the VTP lawsuit would be a reasonable venue to propose this alternative. Unfortunately, CNPS is not at the table with the other litigants,so we can’t offer our services to reach a mutually agreeable solution. That’s the ultimate irony, that we might be able tohelp solve this mess, give the Sierrans their fires, and keep the VTP from approving hundreds of bad projects, but due to thedecisions of people in Sacramento, we’re not there to help.Instead, we need to work through the Endangered Habitats League (EHL) and the Chaparral Institute.

So please donate to help them fight the VTP. Thank you!

Going forward, we also need to think about how much CNPS interests are being damaged by our reluctance both to sue and to pay for lawsuits. There’s a way to strategically litigate that doesn’t involve last minute fundraising, if we have the will toset it up. If we aren’t willing to pay to protect native plants using sound science, who will?