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Barriers to a Restoration Economy
Unrealized potential
The North Coast Restoration Jobs Initiative believes watershed restoration holds unrealized potential to create quality jobs in North Coast communities and restore the natural environment. Although watershed restoration has been ongoing in our region for more than three decades, significant barriers exist that impede restoration planners, workers, and community leaders from actualizing the economic and ecological promise of watershed restoration.
In 2002, the California Resources Agency drafted a report, Removing Barriers to Restoration, which highlights the most apparent challenges facing watershed restoration. Despite this report, the state has made little progress toward addressing its own recommendations. Similar to the report authored by the Resources Agency, the North Coast Restoration Jobs Initiative believes the three most significant barriers to the development of a restoration-based economy are permitting, funding, and a seasonal window of work.
Permitting
Restoration projects commonly require permits from as many as half a dozen separate local, state, and federal regulatory bodies before work is allowed to commence. In addition to being time consuming and cumbersome, the permitting process is acutely redundant and highly inefficient. Many local, state, and federal agencies require the same information in different formats for their own internal review processes and are generally unable to distinguish the differences between a restoration project and a large development effort such as a shopping mall. Proposed solutions to simplify and expedite permitting such as Joint Agency Review Programs and watershed-based permit coordination programs have failed to materialize, further delaying allocated restoration dollars from being applied to their intended purpose.
Funding
Recent research by Forest Community Research indicates that more than $38 million dollars came into Humboldt County during the last three years specifically to fund restoration projects, including roughly $14.5 million for 2002. This revenue is the cumulative total of contributions from a wide variety of local, state, federal, and private sources. While $14.5 million dollars is significant in its own right and a healthy start for a young restoration industry, the North Coast Restoration Jobs Initiative believes the current level of local, state, federal, and private investment is insufficient to result in the necessary ecological improvements to impaired watersheds and the desired economic benefits to local workers through wages and benefits.
Available funding for watershed restoration is not dependable or consistently available to groups from year to year. Unpredictable funding allocations make it difficult for community-based restoration groups and contractors to develop long-term capacity, invest in their workforces, and plan and implement larger-scale programmatic restoration efforts that require multiple years of preparation, continuous staff time, and, of course, funding.
Seasonal Work
A current limiting factor of the Restoration Economy is a severely seasonal window of work. The bulk of ground-level restoration work occurs between late summer and late fall. The beginning of the season is restricted by regulations protecting sensitive species that may be nesting in specific areas of concern. The end of the season is marked by the first heavy rainfall, which poses significant risks for erosion and water quality. As a result, workers and project planners are left with a narrow season within which they are allowed to implement most restoration projects, especially those that require the use of heavy equipment. Other types of restoration projects, namely tree planting and hazard fuel reduction projects, traditionally occur only in wet winter months, again allowing a worker to earn a wage for part of a year yet not for an entire year.
To compensate for short work seasons, workers often work overtime during any given week. Nonetheless, restoration work remains seasonal at best, lending to high rates of attrition within the profession, abbreviated career ladders, and the inability to earn a consistent wage throughout the entire year. The North Coast Restoration Jobs Initiative believes consideration should be given to extend the current window of work when it is ecologically appropriate. Contracting bodies can also help to mitigate this barrier by bundling contracts&Mac220;combining several small, diverse contracts that will result in a variety of different types of work to be completed throughout larger portions of the calendar year.
Overcoming Barriers
Significant barriers do exist that currently impede watershed restoration from reaching its true potential. Nonetheless, plausible solutions have been proposed but have not reached consensus among agencies, restoration groups, scientists, contractors, workers, and conservation advocates. The North Coast Restoration Jobs Initiative feels it is in everyone?s best interest to reach agreement on achievable solutions to the most widely agreed upon barriers.
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