Update June 24, 2024: Over the weekend after this story was published, lawmakers and Gov. Newsom released a new spending plan that restores $45 million to the Habitat Conservation Fund.
For 35 years, the state Habitat Conservation Fund has been a modest but consistent source of money for acquiring, conserving, and improving habitat across California. And Proposition 117, the vote that created the fund, explicitly prevents using that money for anything else.
But last week the state Legislature approved doing exactly that—passing budget legislation proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that moves $45 million allocated to the fund for the next fiscal year into the state’s general fund. And if this holds, environmental groups worry it may set a precedent that endangers at least $120 million more of conservation funding.
“Voters approved the HCF with Prop. 117 because they wanted a permanent source of funding for conservation of lands and waters in California: with the emphasis on permanent,” said Mark Green, the executive director at CalWild, in a statement. CalWild is a nonprofit conservation group focused on protecting public lands and native biodiversity. Over 50 organizations have joined it in fighting the cut, with the hopes that the fund will be reinstated in the usual last-minute budget revisions before the final version is approved at the end of June.
State Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, is among those raising questions about the cut’s legality. Section 8 of the 1990 proposition explicitly stated that “the Legislature shall not reallocate [the funds]”—and required the money to be used for similar purposes. Instead, the Legislature has voted to sunset the fund entirely, putting not only this year’s $45 million, but up to $120 million of promised funding up to 2030 at risk. “I have been vocal in my opposition to cutting the only reliable, ongoing, consistent source of funding for open space acquisition,” Blakespear wrote in a San Diego Union-Tribune op-ed.
California’s budget is volatile, being so reliant on the vicissitudes of income taxes, and 2024 has been a bad year. Amid a $55 billion shortfall, environmental programs have taken a hit: Back in January, Newsom proposed nearly $3.3 billion in cuts to environment, water and climate-change spending. The revised budget reinstates some of that money, but the HCF money remains on the chopping block.
Bay Area counties, cities, and conservation groups have received at least $21.5 million of about $84 million in HCF grants total over the past 33 years. All the money from HCF goes toward acquiring, restoring, or enhancing habitat in one of the fund’s five categories:
- Anadromous fish. Creates habitat and passage for fish like salmon and steelhead, like the $500,000 awarded to Midpeninsula Open Space District in 2009 for acquiring land near Lobitos Creek.
- Deer and mountain lions. Over $1 million, for example, was awarded to Solano County in 1990 to acquire land near Lynch Canyon.
- Endangered species, like the $410,000 dollars that went to East Bay Regional Park District 1991 to help conserve Alameda whipsnake habitat
- Trail construction or public access, such as the $720,000 that went to Hayward Area Park District 2022 for creating trails and signage in Carlos Bee Park.
- Riparian conservation and restoration, including the $4 million spent on restoring riparian habitat near a redwood grove in Napa County in 2011.
- Wetland restoration, including marshes and other wetland areas—$254,000 was spent on Scottsdale Marsh in Novato in 1998, for example.
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