Open Space advisory board adopts Active River Area for grant criteria, asks county GIS to host data

At a recent meeting, the Carbon County Open Space Advisory Board voted to replace the priority water-area metric in its grant criteria with the Nature Conservancy's Active River Area (ARA) calculation and recommended that the county GIS host ARA data on the county website so applicants can determine how projects fit the criteria.

Board members said the change is intended to make scoring more accurate and sustainable. Dawn (Natural Lands staff) told the board that attempts to recreate the previous priority-water-area calculations revealed inconsistencies and that the ARA better reflected the protections the board seeks to capture. "The APCA is an OSI number, and the OSI funding is going away. So that I don't think they're going to continue to be creating and updating the APCA information in the future," Dawn said.

The revised guidance also clarifies how the board will treat EV and HQ streams. Dawn said the board intends to count both existing and designated EV/HQ streams when assessing projects because some streams meet EV/HQ criteria even if they have not completed a formal designation process: "The consensus was that they should still be considered EVHQ because that's what they are even though they're not designated," she said.

Board members moved and seconded approval of the updated criteria language, and the motion passed by voice vote. The board also voted to recommend that the county host the ARA data online so applicants and staff can use it during project scoring. Anna (staff member) said she and Dawn will work with Jason Shellhammer from the county GIS department to make the ARA layers available on the county website.

The board said it will pass the updated criteria and the hosting recommendation on to the county commissioners for their review. No dollar amounts or changes to program funding were adopted at the meeting; the action addressed scoring criteria and public access to mapping data.