Protected species: authorized take: State Route 37 project.

Assembly Member Wilson advances a narrowly tailored change to California’s protection framework by authorizing, under a permitted process, incidental take of four fully protected species tied to the Sears Point to Mare Island Improvement Project on State Route 37, spanning Sonoma, Napa, and Solano counties. The authorization would apply to the salt-marsh harvest mouse, the California Ridgway’s rail, the California black rail, and the white-tailed kite, and would operate as a project-specific exception to the usual prohibitions on taking these species, subject to a defined set of conditions and to ongoing oversight.

The core provisions require four prerequisites for authorization: first, the department must satisfy the standard incidental take permit requirements for the species in question; second, the project must incorporate all measures necessary to meet the applicable conservation standard and to minimize take to the maximum extent practicable; third, the department must approve a monitoring program and an adaptive management plan intended to assess effectiveness and permit adjustments; and fourth, the applicant must pay a permit application fee. Additionally, a permit issued under this framework would cover incidental take that occurs in the course of implementing mitigation or conservation actions required by the permit, and permit conditions could be amended in response to monitoring and adaptive management results. The measure also notes that this provision does not exempt the project from other applicable laws.

To implement the approach, the bill amends the existing prohibitions on fully protected birds and mammals to recognize a new pathway for incidental take tied to the named project, while preserving notification and public-participation requirements for proposed authorizations of take and clarifying that “scientific research” does not include mitigation activities. The four species’ listing within the fully protected categories is retained, with the new process integrating them into a California Endangered Species Act framework that can be invoked specifically for this SR 37 project, rather than creating a broad, generalized permission for incidental take elsewhere. The measure requires a balance of regulatory oversight, stakeholder input, and project-level mitigation, without establishing a general policy shift beyond the single, defined project.

From a policy and implementation perspective, the proposal assigns oversight to the department to administer the incidental take permit and approve the monitoring and adaptive management plan, with the project bearing most upfront costs through the required permit fee and ongoing commitments for monitoring and mitigation. The bill does not include an explicit appropriation, and the processing timeline for the permit would follow existing procedures, subject to departmental practice. In the broader context, the measure seeks a precise alignment between transportation development and targeted conservation safeguards, maintaining compliance with other statutes while introducing a defined mechanism to address unavoidable impacts for a specific infrastructure project.