Panorama completed an audit of the Santa Clara Valley Water District (SCVWD) compliance with compensatory mitigation and monitoring requirements. Our team conducted an inventory of all mitigation requirements, determined the extent to which SCVWD is meeting its mitigation obligations, and identified best practices and areas for continued improvement and efficiency for negotiating permits and implementing permit conditions. We found that small increases in mitigation ratios resulted in adding millions of dollars to compensatory mitigation costs. A key recommendation was for SCVWD planners and an outside attorney to negotiate mitigation measures and permit conditions, rather than the project engineer.

Panorama also benchmarked SCVWD’s mitigation obligations against similar water agencies and provided SCVWD with recommendations for improving and streamlining their compliance process. The benchmarking review showed that the SCVWD mitigation requirements were generally similar to those of other agencies; however, there were more categories of impacts and mitigation monitoring timeframes were longer than those of other agencies.