Oregon Commission Adopts Amended Sage-Grouse Rules to Provide Regulatory Certainty

By Vanessa Torres

Oregon -(Ammoland.com)- The Fish and Wildlife Commission adopted amended administrative rules for sage-grouse management in Oregon at its meeting in Salem today.

The new rules require mitigation actions to offset impacts of large-scale and other developments such as aggregate mining, wind, solar, and geothermal energy plants.

Before today, ODFW mitigation rules were effectively only recommendations to permitting entities and not requirements for mitigating development impacts in designated core habitat for sage-grouse. Core habitats are areas which encompass about one-third of Oregon’s sage-grouse habitat but support more than 90 percent of the bird’s populations.

On July 24th, the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) adopted new rules that would allow limited development in core habitat after going through an avoidance test (meaning the project proposal shows other areas were considered but development is dependent on unique geographic features of the site, not feasible elsewhere, and necessary for infrastructure, economic opportunity or public health safety). The new LCDC rules also require developments to follow ODFW’s mitigation rules.

The administrative rules of ODFW and LCDC will work together …read more

Source:: AmmoLand