Benefits from Avoidance, Minimization, and Mitigation. To achieve the habitat goals and the ultimate population goal, the CCAA promotes the avoidance, minimization, and mitigation of impacts of land by oil and gas development within habitat for the LEPC, with an emphasis on focal areas, connectivity zones, and high quality habitat. By creating incentives to locate new developments outside of focal areas, connectivity zones, and high quality habitat, direct and indirect impacts to LEPCs and their habitat will be greatly reduced. The CCAA encourages avoidance of focal areas, connectivity zones, and other high-quality habitat by assigning higher mitigation fees to these areas. Additionally, the CCAA encourages co-location of new oil and gas development near existing development by allowing participants to reduce mitigation fees by siting development within the impacted area associated with existing infrastructure. Similarly, Conservation Measures encourage the use of common rights-of-way for infrastructure and the use of directional drilling techniques and clustering of facilities where feasible to minimize impacts of new development to LEPC habitat. The CCAA also requires Conservation Measures that minimize impacts from development to the LEPC when complete avoidance of impacts is not possible. For example, the CCAA includes a seasonal timing restriction limiting oil and gas construction and maintenance activities in areas within 1.25 miles of leks to avoid potential disturbance of LEPCs and, where such activities cannot be avoided, the CCAA includes a daily timing restriction to benefit LEPCs by reducing indirect disturbance during the lekking, nesting and brooding seasons. Additional measures, such as the burying of distribution lines, will further minimize indirect impacts of new oil and gas development to LEPC. In situations when impacts occur which cannot be fully addressed through avoidance and minimization procedures, this CCAA employs a mitigation framework that is based on the RWP and described in Appendix A. The RWP mitigation framework is a biologically based system that incorporates space, time and habitat quality to quantify both the impacts to habitat (impact units) and improvements to habitat (offset and remediation units). The mitigation framework does not evaluate impacts based merely on the amount of surface disturbance that results from development; the mitigation framework identifies a buffer surrounding infrastructure, the size of which varies by infrastructure type. The mitigation framework...
