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OWEB staff presents risk matrix as board wrestles with trade-offs in land acquisitions
Summary
OWEB staff walked the committee through a multi-category risk matrix (fiduciary, operational, strategic/policy, environmental) designed to clarify which program safeguards address different severities; board members pressed staff to factor likelihood and cost and to add permanent-loss examples to high-risk scenarios.
Renee Davis, OWEB acquisitions and special programs manager, presented a color-coded risk matrix intended to separate types and severities of risk that the land acquisition grant program faces.
Davis explained the matrix divides risk into fiduciary, operational, strategic/policy and environmental/ecological categories, and she illustrated lower-risk and higher-risk examples: paying due-diligence costs for unsuccessful closings (lower risk) versus investing in a property that later undergoes uses inconsistent with Measure 76 conservation purposes (higher risk). She asked the committee where staff should focus attention and how to weight likelihood versus consequence.
Board members responded with clarifying questions about whether risk assessments should pair likelihood estimates with consequence values. "When we're talking about the type of agreements, I think we should be talking about risk of these sorts of things happening," Mark Webb said, urging the committee to include probability assessments alongside impact costs. Bruce Buckmaster and others pressed staff to include permanent loss of high-priority habitat as a high-risk example.
Staff said the matrix is an early, iterative tool and invited more detailed follow-up, including comparing specific easement terms and implementing a likelihood layer in future versions. The committee asked staff to return with clarifying scenarios and to bring easement-term examples for a future meeting.
