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Marine Fisheries advisory committee previews 2026 CHIP amendment, timelines and tools
Summary
Division of Marine Fisheries staff told an advisory committee the 2026 Coastal Habitat Protection Plan amendment will add issue papers on ecosystem-based management, strategic habitat areas, wetland change and thin-layer placement, and SAV protections; staff outlined a schedule of advisory reviews and public comment before a planned November adoption.
Division of Marine Fisheries staff on Thursday briefed the Marine Fisheries advisory committee on progress drafting the 2026 amendment to the Coastal Habitat Protection Plan (CHIP), outlining proposed chapters, near-term timelines and opportunities for committee feedback.
Charlie Dean, habitat protection supervisor at the Division of Marine Fisheries, said staff have nearly finished drafting four issue papers that will be added to the CHIP: ecosystem-based management, SAV (submerged aquatic vegetation) protection and restoration, planning for wetland change (including thin-layer placement), and community engagement integrated across chapters. Dean said staff held scoping meetings with DEQ divisions, organized feedback into a framework and plan to present a brief to the Environmental Management Commission next month before returning to advisory committees in August–September and pursuing final adoption in November.
On ecosystem-based management, Dean said the amendment will recommend establishing management goals, selecting ecosystem indicators (building on an existing Collaboratory study), hosting a partner workshop to set thresholds, and producing an accessible status-and-trends report card modeled on established statewide examples. "Once we have all of our ecosystem indicators together, we can use those to understand the long term trends of the habitats," he said.
The CHIP steering team proposed formalizing analysis from a validation study of strategic habitat areas (SHAs) and exploring nonregulatory management options for areas found to have higher habitat complexity and species richness. Dean said SHAs in sample regions generally showed greater habitat diversity and species richness than comparable reference sites.
On schedule and process, staff said draft chapters will be circulated to advisory committee members in advance of the August meeting and that the committee will be asked to provide additional targeted feedback before public comment periods. Dean emphasized staff capacity limits, noting earlier plans to create a standalone community engagement chapter were folded into other chapters because of resource constraints.
The committee did not take formal votes on policy changes at the meeting; members and the public were invited to submit written comments and to participate in future workshops and pilot-project planning sessions.
