Prospectus for a Resource Support Service for Conservation Groups in San Diego County

Executive Summary

March 2003

Over the next decade, approximately one-half million acres of habitat will be set aside for conservation in San Diego County to protect the region’s outstanding biological diversity. Protection and management of this open space will require substantial funding and staffing and a coordinated commitment from diverse groups, including municipalities, resource agencies, and local citizens' groups.

Community-based citizens' groups have a vested interest in these open space lands, which embody the quality of life they treasure in San Diego County. Over the past decade or more, these groups have been working somewhat independently in various areas of the county to protect cultural and biological resources and quality of life on a local and regional basis. There will be an even greater need for citizens' contributions in the future with the increased land conservation. For these groups to successfully shoulder this greater responsibility for conservation and management of open space will require:

• A desire and commitment from individual groups to work together and allocate resources more efficiently
• Mobilizing and coordinating volunteer workforces and jointly identifying needs for regional support
• A new source of long-term funding, significantly greater than that which is sustaining conservation groups now
• Greater political stature and visibility
• This draft report summarizes the status of an initial evaluation of the desirability and feasibility of creating a resource support service for conservation groups in San Diego County. The conservation community generally agrees that such a service, to be successful, should (1) foster collaboration and coordination, not competition, among conservation groups through increased communication, and (2) attract new sources of funding unavailable to individual conservation organizations (i.e., increase the overall level of funding for the region).
  

This draft report presents a potential strategy for initiating a conservation resource collaborative or center (CRC) to serve the conservation community. The strategy focuses on initially building the capacity to provide a subset of the needs desired by the local conservation groups—namely, Geographic Information System (GIS) services, volunteer coordination, and a conservation clearinghouse—with the assumption that these services currently are not readily available to most San Diego County nongovernmental conservation organizations. Under the proposed strategy, the CRC would be initiated by building capacity within an existing host organization and grow incrementally, at a pace and direction supported by the governing organizations, to coordinate support services for the greater conservation community.

The CRC will require significant financial resources, depending on the level of staffing. In particular, GIS services require substantial capital investment—in equipment, data, and software development. Estimated annual costs, including capital and operating costs, could range from around $190,000 in Year 1 to around $600,000 in Year 8.

It is assumed that the CRC would be funded initially through private contributions and member dues. Obtaining funding for start-up would be realistic only if the CRC has a credible long-term financing plan. A detailed financing plan would be required if the CRC concept moves forward. New public funding would be necessary for continuation of the CRC over the long term, supplemented by fees for services from the user community. In the San Diego region, funding for habitat conservation and management has been linked to the Regional Comprehensive Plan effort to integrate land uses, transportation systems, and other infrastructure needs. Over the next 1–2 years, there is a window of opportunity to secure sustained funding for management and monitoring of conserved lands across the county, as part of the proposed funding package for implementing the Regional Comprehensive Plan. The proposed strategy assumes that this regional funding would serve as the long-term core funding for the CRC, as well as provide new funds to individual local conservation organizations that may, in turn, contract for CRC services.

 We hope that this report will generate comments and continued discussions and will help in defining the vision that would most efficiently support and enhance San Diego County conservation efforts.

For more information, please contact Jerre Ann Stallcup in the CBI San Diego office.