Since its launch in July 2003, EEP has helped to restore, enhance and protect the state’s ecosystems through unique partnerships and a commitment to break new ground. The partnership between NCDENR, the N.C. Department of Transportation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Wilmington District is providing compensatory mitigation of the highest quality to offset development in North Carolina.
EEP is helping to maintain the state’s quality of life, to continue its economic expansion and to ensure the health and well-being of its citizens. But how did we get to this point, and where are we going?
EEP’s roots lie in the formation of a cooperative process-improvement initiative involving more than 10 state and federal natural-systems agencies in 2001. Although North Carolina was addressing its mitigation challenges, the question remained whether we were doing so as efficiently and effectively as we needed to – and the evidence we were facing was not entirely positive.
As we’re fond of saying here at EEP, it’s not easy to change the tires on a moving truck. But that’s pretty much the task we faced when the initiative came into existence two years ago, and here’s why.
During the 1990s, North Carolina as a whole underwent a growth spurt. With it came the need for the highway bill, an aggressive and important program to connect major cities and provide loop systems around major metropolitan areas.
With a program focused largely on new location, NCDOT began to experience increased project delays in its transportation infrastructure program because of unavoidable environmental impacts. While NCDOT and NCDENR both were addressing mitigation through independently functioning programs with different operating processes, the efforts failed to satisfy either federal or state regulators, as well as environmental interest groups.
The process-improvement task force looked at the issues and made recommendations that mitigation should be provided years in advance of project impact, and be designed to replace unavoidable functional losses to wetlands and riparian buffers. EEP was conceived as a national model for compensatory mitigation by addressing environmental impacts proactively, and by building public-private partnerships to achieve our goals.
The ensuing two years saw business and operational planning go forward that encompassed funding authorization, consensus-building with environmental- and mitigation-interest groups, legal support, regulatory-agency agreements, and transition plans for staffing and logistics. On July 22, 2003, a memorandum of agreement between NCDOT, NCDENR and USACE established the program’s procedures, commencing a two-year transition period that will complete operational and organizational development.
Since its inception, EEP’s management and staff have worked every day to fulfill the program’s mission. Here’s a list of significant accomplishments:
- To help facilitate responsible improvements in transportation and other economic development, EEP is improving mitigation in the state. At the end of the last decade, when North Carolina identified problems in delivering on road projects because of permitting delays, the state was seeing an estimated 40 percent of the construction projects in its one-billion-dollar highway program sidetracked by lack of mitigation. After the first two years of the EEP program, the percentage has dropped to zero.
- What’s more, EEP’s mitigation stockpiling has reduced significant delays during highway planning, as mitigation issues no longer have to be addressed in this phase of transportation improvements. EEP’s mitigation efforts have helped to move forward nearly $1.9 billion in road building in the state since July 2003, without a single project delay due to a lack of mitigation. Mitigation costs have totaled $55 million over the life of EEP, about 2.8 percent of the cost of the road projects and an excellent return on investment for the state.
- To preserve high-quality natural areas across the state, EEP has collaborated with public- and private-sector allies since 2003 to set aside more than 30,000 acres for future generations, protecting more than 130 miles of streams and about 7,000 acres of wetlands. Additional preservation areas, earmarked for protection and under negotiation with landowners, totals about 134 miles of streams and about 2,000 acres of wetlands. Fourteen of the tracts will be open to the public and managed as state parks or game lands.
- To protect water quality and enhance watersheds, EEP and its private-sector partners are carrying out nearly 400 active restoration projects, including 215 stream projects totaling more than 150 miles of restoration, and about 7,600 acres of wetland restoration in 125 projects; EEP also has about 30 watershed plans completed or underway in cooperation with local partners. The state awarded contracts in 2004 to private-sector firms on EEP wetland, stream and buffer restoration projects worth $39.7 million, involving 143,000 feet of streams, 625 acres of wetlands and 75 acres of riparian buffers.
As you’ll find elsewhere in this inaugural edition of EEP Undercurrents, we’re moving in the right direction, but there’s much yet to do. EEP will continue to perform in a manner that supports both the vitality of the state’s resources and responsible growth in North Carolina. We’re growing and changing by design, and the coming end of the two-year transition period brings major challenges our way.
Let’s get to work. |
