Ten years ago, Sally Fairview took a job at the EPA because it combined her interests in preserving the environment with her interest in public policy. She views herself not as an activist, but as a public servant, charged with the task of fairly enforcing environmental legislation.
The role of the Ohio EPA is to protect the natural environment and residents' health, but to do so in a reasonable, measured, and systematic fashion. Although the EPA has the ultimate authority to enforce actions against violators of pollution laws and regulations, the emphasis of the agency has been on working in a cooperative manner with other parts of the government, private organizations, and business.
The Division of Surface Water, Sally's home office within the EPA, is responsible for protecting, enhancing, and restoring all of Ohio's waters, including wetlands. She is personally responsible for evaluating 404 permits involving wetland filling and dredging. She feels that her role is particularly important within the agency, since wetland development often results in greater degradation to water quality than other projects that the EPA reviews.
Section 404 of the Clean Water Act requires developers who intend to alter aquatic ecosystems to obtain a permit from the EPA. The permit must demonstrate that: (1) impacts to aquatic resources cannot be avoided, (2) efforts to minimize aquatic resource impacts through modification of construction plans and designs have been taken, and (3) compensation for unavoidable impacts has been made. This last part is known as wetland "mitigation"—in exchange for eliminating a wetland for development, the developer is required to pay for the re-creation of wetlands of "equivalent value" elsewhere. The way it works is that the value of the wetland that the developers propose to destroy is rated from "1" to "3," with "3" being highest quality (i.e., relatively pristine, high species diversity, etc.). The Cleveland airport site was rated a "3."
The EPA then decides how many acres of new wetland a developer must create or restore for each acre of wetland they destroy (the "mitigation ratio"). Developers sometimes do the restoration/creation themselves, but it is much more common for them to pay others to do it (for-profit companies, non-profits, and more recently public parks have all entered the mitigation business). Sally agrees strongly with the standing policy of the EPA and the Army Corps that favors wetland creation/restoration in areas that have historically been wetlands and in areas relatively close to the development site. Three criteria qualify a site for possible use as a wetland mitigation site: hydric (wetland) soils, wetland hydrology, and wetland plants. In this region of Ohio developers typically pay approximately $10,000-15,000/acre for restored wetland.
In general, Sally strongly favors the growing trend in public policy towards allowing developers and industry to develop and pollute on one site in exchange for improving overall conditions. On balance this approach encourages efficient economic growth and preservation of the environment with little cost to taxpayers. However, she is aware of a number of downsides to this approach when it comes to wetland mitigation. One is that the Corps of Engineers typically relies on consultants hired by the developers for most of the hands-on assessment of restored wetland quality—there is a financial incentive for consultants to bend analyses towards the wishes of the developers who hire them. Second, there are few officers assigned to check up on the quality of the restored sites (only two in Northeast Ohio). Third, there is only a five-year period during which the constructed wetlands are monitored at all. Finally, little evidence exists, one way or another, to indicate whether wetland mitigation really works as intended over the long term—the presence of "indicator" wetland plant species on a restored site immediately following restoration work does not necessarily mean that the new system provides the functional values provided by a natural wetland or will remain a wetland in the future.
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