Thumbnail image: Dean Wilson mentioned a tunnel project around Last Chance Grade south of Crescent City as a potential project that would require Caltrans with mitigation requirements. | Image courtesy of Caltrans District 1
Five months after his colleague suggested banking county properties for mitigation purposes, District 5 Supervisor Dean Wilson said he’s searching for someone who can propose legislation that would exempt counties like Del Norte from that requirement.
Wilson said Wednesday that his proposed legislation would apply to Del Norte County and others that house vast swaths of public and tribal lands. To illustrate why a mitigation exemption is critical to Del Norte, he pointed to two impending projects on U.S. 101 — the tunnel bypass around Last Chance Grade and efforts to protect the highway from sea level rise near South Beach.
Wilson also mentioned a runway safety project the Border Coast Regional Airport Authority completed about 12 years ago. In that situation, the requirement came from the California Coastal Commission. And while the BCRAA spearheaded the project, it fell to the county to find the land to meet those mitigation requirements.
Del Norte County, Wilson said, had to pony up enough land to meet the Coastal Commission’s 7-to-1 ratio — that is, 7 acres where mitigation occurs for every acre of wetland that is impacted.
“We had development at Pacific Shores, and so we had some lands over there, but our problem is we’re running out,” he told Redwood Voice Community News on Thursday. “We just don’t have a lot of the suitable land they want.”
Wilson said the issue was already part of the county’s 2025 Legislative Platform. On Wednesday, he asked his colleagues to refine the language to add more specificity ahead of the Board’s 2026 Legislative platform.
“Del Norte County is among the most land-limited jurisdictions in California, with approximately 80% of its land under public ownership,” he said. “This ownership pattern already provides habitat conservation, carbon sequestration, watershed protection and open-space benefits equivalent to those typically achieved through project-level mitigation. Requiring additional mitigation in such counties is redundant and inequitable.”
Wilson also proposed a mitigation credit to counties, tribes or other entities that spearhead restoration projects to the watersheds or fisheries within their jurisdiction.
“We have spent millions and millions of dollars here in Del Norte County and the tribe has spent millions of dollars up in the Yurok Tribal area to enhance these things and yet there is no credit given to the dollars that are spent to do these enhancements,” he said.
Wilson said his legislation proposal would consider restoration projects dating back to 2015 for a $1 to $1 credit towards mitigation.
“We would actually be getting credit into our counties for the efforts we have taken to improve our public lands,” he said.
District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey said she supported having a discussion about Wilson’s proposed legislation. But she wanted to hear from tribal stakeholders and others before she committed to supporting the legislation itself.
“I don’t want to lock myself into supporting formal legislation if it doesn’t fit for the stakeholders in the area,” she said.
Wilson’s proposal drew mixed reaction from public commenters. Some, like Sam Strait, welcomed an opportunity to push back against state mandates that often cost counties millions of dollars but offer little benefit.
However local community advocate Alicia Williams, who has been speaking out against pesticide use in the Smith River Easter lily bulb industry, said the mitigation requirement exists because there are few wetlands left. Del Norte’s wetlands, she said, are “highly degraded.”
“Ask for a local management partnership of these lands,” she said. “I’ve heard at different meetings people complain about the state and federal (governments) not managing lands they own and we have to suffer the consequences.”
The proposal to bank county property for mitigation purposes came from District 1 Supervisor Darrin Short in July. At the time he and his colleagues were considering selling 18 parcels in Pacific Shores to the Wildlife Conservation Board.
Short and his colleague District 3 Supervisor Chris Howard were absent on Wednesday.
At that July meeting, Assistant County Administrative Officer Randy Hooper told supervisors that he had surveyed the area to determine if the parcels could be used to mitigate wetland damage from future infrastructure projects. He said that they were already functioning as healthy wetlands or dune habitat and were ineligible for mitigation purposes
On Thursday, Wilson said he wasn’t sure how mitigation works when a state agency is performing the infrastructure project in question, This includes whether the land needed for mitigation purposes could come from outside the region. For Del Norte, that question is problematic because it depends on whether the county has the land and whether it’s suitable.
Referring to the potential sea level rise project on South Beach, Wilson said that most of the area are wetlands that house sensitive species. The Last Chance Grade tunnel cuts through Redwood National and State Parks as well as U.S. Forest Service land, he said.
“At some point we just have to draw a line in the sand and say, yeah, you already have enough of (our) public lands,” he said. “If you get to the point where you’re having to buy lands just to take it off the (tax) rolls, it adds so much more expense to these projects.”
