The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) prepares comprehensively revised draft Coastal Barrier Resources System (CBRS) boundaries for public review (referred to as “proposed”) or Congressional consideration (referred to as “final recommended”). These revised boundaries make progress towards fulfilling a mandate in the Coastal Barrier Resources Reauthorization Act (Pub. L. 109-226) to modernize all CBRS maps and make recommendations to Congress for the expansion of the CBRS. The revised boundaries will only become effective if enacted into law by Congress.
The CBRS Projects Mapper indicates the different types of changes (or lack thereof) for each area that has been comprehensively remapped. These categories are as follows:
- Reclassification from Otherwise Protected Area (OPA) to System Unit: An area that is proposed/recommended to change from its current OPA designation (which carries only a prohibition on Federal flood insurance) to a System Unit (which carries prohibitions on a wider array of Federal expenditures and financial assistance). This type of change is often based on when the particular area was included within the CBRS and whether the area was held for conservation and/or recreation at the time it was included.
- Reclassification from System Unit to OPA: An area that is proposed/recommended to change from its current System Unit designation (which carries prohibitions on a wide array of Federal expenditures and financial assistance) to an OPA (which carries only a prohibition on Federal flood insurance). This type of change is often based on when the particular area was included within the CBRS and whether the area was held for conservation and/or recreation at the time it was included.
- Transfer from System Unit to System Unit or Transfer from OPA to OPA: An area that is proposed/recommended to change from its current unit number to another unit number. This is generally done to simplify the mapping of an area where there are adjacent units of the same unit type. There is no change to the prohibitions of an area that is transferred from one unit number to another so long as they are the same type of unit.
- No Change: An area that is currently within the CBRS that is not proposed/recommended for removal or reclassification.
