Item 27 - Appeal Application Nos. 2020-03 and 2020-04 - Central Pointe Mixed-Use Development

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BIOLOGICAL IMPACTS ASSESSMENT Very little open space remains within the City of Santa Ana, after the vast majority of land in the City was converted to residential, commercial and industrial uses. The little open space that remains is therefore of critical habitat value to resident and migratory wildlife. The site composes a diminishing patch of open space within an expanse of anthropogenic land uses, forcing more birds to use the site as stopover and staging habitat during migration, dispersal, and home range patrol (Warnock 201o, Taylor et al. 2011, Runge et al. 2014). Should the project go forward, the lost stopover value of the site would expose birds moving through the area to even greater energetic challenges than they already experience. Many of these birds would be less capable of negotiating collision hazards. That many birds fly through the aerohabitat of the greater Los Angeles megacity has long been known. The project site is on the Pacific Flyway and near the coast, where millions of birds annually fly through on migration. Just this past spring, on 22 April 2020, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Birdcast project documented 66,044 birds/km flying nocturnally within detection range of radar at the KVTX Los Angeles station (https: //birdeast.info/scientific-discussion/migration-update-morning-flight-madness- in-southern-california-22-april-2o20/). Because of this migration and for other reasons, the Los Angeles Basin is a biodiversity hot spot. Often unseen by human eyes, migrating birds fly day and night, often stopping over in whatever open space is available and in trees. Each time migrants take off again for the next leg of their migration, they will do what they must to conserve energy. Too often, these birds will attempt to fly the shortest distance along falsely perceived pathways through the structural glass panels of buildings. And too often, they will attempt to fly to the next tree, or to the image of the tree that is reflected on the glass panel of a building. This is the type of impact my comment letter addresses. Since the 2007 EIR and 2o18 SEIR, ornithologists learned that North American bird abundance declined 29% over the last 48 years (Rosenberg et al. 2019). Although the ecological and economic consequences of this decline have yet to be understood, they are likely to be severe. In response to this new circumstance — whether directly or indirectly, Governor Newsome signed AB 454 into law on 27 September 2019. This new law amended California Fish and Game Code section 3513 to further protect birds addressed by the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. This new law carries particular significance for the impacts of window collisions that the proposed project would have on birds, as I will discuss shortly. Not only do all native migratory birds now have the additional protection of California's Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but at least 44 special -status species of bird are known to the project area (Table 1). With the release of a study just this year, we also know that 21 of these special -status species have been documented as window collision fatalities and are therefore susceptible to new structural glass installations (Basilio et al. 2020: Supplemental Material). Many more species newly protected by AB 454 have also been documented as window collision victims (Basilio et al. 2020). 2