Representatives from the energy industry, conservation groups and county planning offices recently told members of the Western Governors' Wildlife Council (WGWC) that efforts to create the western regional "Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool" (CHAT) are already paying huge dividends. The CHAT is envisioned as a West-wide, seamless mapping system that identifies the highest value wildlife habitat areas and the corridors that provide connectivity across the landscape. The western governors directed the WGWC to develop the CHAT as a non-regulatory means of protecting the wildlife that is critical to the economy and quality of life in the West, while helping to facilitate energy and resource development.

Several states have already developed elements of the CHAT within their borders. Washington's Fish and Wildlife Priority Habitat and Species and Montana's Crucial Area Planning System (CAPS) are among the most fully developed. Arizona, California and Wyoming will be releasing components of the CHAT for their states in the coming months.

During the last year, the WGWC also supported pilot efforts to integrate fish and wildlife data across western state borders. This resulted in development of the?Southern Great Plains Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool developed by Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

At the WGWC meeting in Seattle on November 3-4, Patricia Horn, Vice President for Environment, Health and Safety with Oklahoma Gas and Electric, and Brad Loveless, Director of Biology and Conservation Programs for Westar Energy, described how their companies have used the Kansas and Oklahoma beginnings of the CHAT to help with siting development of wind generation and electric transmission lines. Mr. Loveless said his company "uses the Kansas natural resource planning system every day to merge industry-specific data layers with biological information."

As an example, Ms. Horn and Mr. Loveless described how the system helped them identify the importance of the Red Hills in southern Kansas, based on the presence of four major bat hibernacula. Their companies chose to route transmission lines around, rather than through, the Red Hills as initially proposed by utility engineers who based their design on the most direct routes between load centers in the two states. The decision to re-route the line was challenged by a developer who wanted to build wind-generation capacity in the Red Hills and needed the line sited nearby to make that development cost-effective. Mr. Loveless said the facts that Kansas' natural resource planning system is quantitative, well-documented and transparent were crucial to Westar's ability to sustain their decision despite significant economic consequences to the developer.

Spencer Kimball, Government Affairs Manager for the Western Energy Alliance, and David Brown, Contract Regulatory Lead for BP America, also addressed the importance of the CHAT. According to Mr. Kimball, oil and gas development in the western states has the potential to replace the current, combined imports from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Venezuela, Colombia, Algeria, Nigeria and Russia. He added that"The CHAT serves as an ?early warning system' that allows developers to identify potential problems at the beginning of the planning process." And it will "lead to more intelligible conversations between industry, regulators and resource managers" that will minimize the impact of development on wildlife.

Ms. Charity Fechter, Planning Director for Madison County, Montana, told the WGWC how her staff, the Planning Board and County Commissioners are using the Montana CAPS component of CHAT to guide land-use decisions that promote economic growth, without sacrificing the traditional values and wildlife resources in their county. Although predominantly rural, with a long history of ranching, agriculture, hunting, fishing and outfitting, Madison County also is home to both the Big Sky and Moonlight Basin ski resorts. According to Ms. Fechter, the developers of Moonlight Basin told her that if CAPS had been available when they started their project, they would have been able to identify a major travel corridor for grizzly bears that transects the property and could have altered plans for the resort, making the locale safer for both bears and people. She said the non-regulatory nature of the system avoids many of the concerns raised by westerners who often are suspicious of government. She also emphasized the importance of including the meta-data as part of the system, because it allows everyone to see where the information came from and it eliminates debate about reliability of the output. Madison County is moving to include use of the CAPS as part of its growth policy and subdivision review process as a way to reduce both the time required and contentiousness of land-use decision making.

At the conclusion of the WGWC meeting, outgoing Vice-chair John Mankowski emphasized that completing the CHAT by 2013 is an ambitious goal that will require continued support from all levels of government and from non-government partners. Endorsements like those offered by the industry and county representatives, among others at the recent meeting, are crucial to maintaining that support.

Learn more about the CHAT. (cs)