“Implementing a watershed approach to locating, designing and building large scale wetland mitigation projects helps ensure that the wetland functions and processes critical to the watershed are being restored”

 Location and Function

The MBS bank projects are uniquely located within the Snohomish watershed, and have been able to restore a wide range of wetland habitat types and adjoining uplands. These include aquatic bed, emergent, shrub and forested wetlands, stream and riverine habitat as well as upland buffers. Within these habitats wetland functions that are critical to the watershed have been restored including: the reconnection of aquatic and terrestrial habitats, off-channel rearing and refuge for salmon, flood storage, flood desynchronization and water quality improvements.

 Protections

Typical permittee sponsored mitigation projects often result in small isolated mitigation projects that are not adequately maintained or protected and cannot offer the same ecological uplift.  Additionally, permittee sponsored mitigation projects are not always maintained or managed effectively and do not have the long term protections associated with a mitigation bank.  Mitigation bank projects have a required monitoring period of ten years and credits are only released when a bank project has met its required performance standards. Each bank project is then protected in perpetuity through the establishment of a conservation easement, held by a third party land steward.

 Benefits to the Applicant

From an applicant’s perspective, purchasing bank credits to fulfill mitigation requirements reduces costs and the liability and risk of future failures. When an applicant purchases credits from a bank they are free to move on with their own development project saving them the costs of monitoring and maintaining their own mitigation. Simply put, this allows the applicant to focus on their core competencies and current projects while transferring their mitigation requirements to more sustainable and professionally bank project.

Purchasing credits from MBS is also unique in that the applicant can receive their credits from multiple bank sources. Because mitigation bank credits from the MBS banks are universal in nature and calculated out in the same way, the ability to withdraw a credit from a larger pool of resources brings a greater diversity of habitat restoration in multiple locations of the watershed.