Introduction to Ecological Offsets (More than just wetland banking)
Presenter: Jon Kasitz, RES
When? Thursday, March 28, 2024; 8:30am-10:00am
Cost? Free for CCE Members
Location? West Goshen Township Administrative Building, 2nd Floor, 1025 Paoli Pike, West Chester, PA 19380 (please park in the lot designated for training events)
Description: As regulations covering land-development projects continue to evolve, more and more projects are requiring one or more types of environmental or ‘ecological offsets’ to mitigate the project’s unavoidable impacts to sensitive environmental resources, such as wetlands, riparian buffers, and endangered species, and water-quality. The ecological offset market started in the 1990’s with wetland mitigation banking (fill in one acre of wetland, replace one acre somewhere else), but now in PA also includes streams, riparian buffers, endangered species (bats and bog turtles), and water-quality (MS4 and NPDES). Jon will provide an overview of how these ecological offsets work, how they’re applied to projects, how RES develops ‘credits’, and will be informative to help project-developers ensure that ecological offsets are identified early in the land-development process, to keep your project on schedule and budget, in the event that one or more of these forms of offset is required to keep your project compliant with state and federal regulations.
Attendees will earn one (1) PDH.