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| Shifting
wetlands oversight imperils protection Commentary By Linda Young FLORIDA VOICES Daytona Beach News-Journal - http://www.news-journalonline.com Last update: November 19, 2005 Last summer's battered coasts offer Florida a lesson: Hurricanes are getting fiercer, and our years of destroying wetlands are making the damage worse. Wetlands absorb the storm surge that comes rushing at our coasts. But year after year, developers are getting leaders to weaken the regulations that keep wetlands intact. Developers pushed a bill through the Legislature last spring that ordered the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to start taking over wetlands permitting from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, initially for projects that cover 10 or fewer acres. More than 90 percent of all wetlands destruction requests affect 10 acres or less. After the bill passed, the St. Petersburg Times got records showing that a Florida Home Builders Association lobbyist, Frank Matthews, helped write the bill. Now, developers are pressuring our elected representatives in Washington to get the Corps to turn over wetlands permitting to the state DEP, so that the state can issue wetland destruction permits faster. This is a bad idea. The Corps' wetland protection program has been abysmal, that's true. The agency issues more wetlands destruction permits in Florida than anywhere else in the United States, according to an investigation by the St. Petersburg Times. In Florida, the Corps has denied only five permits in the last six years and has granted 12,000 permits to destroy wetlands, the Times found. Putting the program in the hands of the Florida DEP would make a bad situation worse. State and federal wetlands permitting programs differ in the types of wetlands that are included for protection. Florida's list of wetland "indicator plants" is less inclusive than the federal government's. The Corps' rules protect 3 million more acres of Florida's wetlands than the state rules do. The Florida DEP also has no authority to require developers to avoid wetlands or minimize impacts. The Corps, on the other hand, considers the public interest of destroying a wetland, whether a development will degrade water quality and also whether a project can be built elsewhere to avoid wetlands altogether. And the Corps can require an environmental assessment or impact statement before wetlands are destroyed. Now, DEP officials are saying that they would need more money from the Legislature to take over the federal program. In the current political climate, we'd likely get an underfunded program with fewer protections. It's also important to take a hard look at what happened when Florida DEP took over another federal program -- the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES -- which regulates discharges from industrial sites, sewage plants and other polluters. DEP has allowed exemption after exemption to the rules that are supposed to keep polluters from dumping toxins into public waters. The exemptions are violations of the Clean Water Act, and they go on daily. In several cases, the DEP has "solved" pollution problems in rivers and bays by permitting long pipes to send the toxic stuff farther out into public waters. That's environmental protection? Florida has a long history of allowing politically powerful polluters and developers to bend the rules for profit. We shouldn't allow Congress to delegate another federal permitting program to the state -- especially when our state's vanishing wetlands leave us vulnerable to the ocean's fury every summer. Forty-eight environmental
and civic groups recently sent a letter to the Florida Congressional
delegation urging it to fight this weakening of wetlands protections.
Take a minute and call your elected representatives in Washington
to tell them it's a bad idea to give wetlands permitting to the
DEP. We can't afford to lose more buffers from storms. |