Mud fight on the Skagit
Which is more threatened: wetlands or farmlands? And bear in mind that Skagit Valley farmland is perhaps the finest dirt in the world.
Skagitonians to Preserve Farmland
Moontrolling
Washington state law directs local governments to preserve wetlands and farmlands. These twin directives have run splat up against each other in a soggy little creek drainage east of Mt. Vernon, in the Skagit Valley.
Caught in the middle are investors who bought 800 acres of valley land including the former Clear Valley dairy farm on Nookachamps Creek, with a plan to make half of it into a "wetlands mitigation bank." That's an enterprise, new to Puget Sound, that makes money from state and federal laws aimed at reducing the net loss of wetlands. Mitigation bankers sell compensatory credits to developers and to government agencies that claim they need to destroy wetlands to make a place for buildings and highways.
In theory, developers make up for the wetlands they're destroying by paying into the wetland banks. Both the Washington Department of Ecology and the US Army Corps of Engineers have blessed the concept. Those agencies are simultaneously cheerleaders and regulators of the mitigation banks.
A few weeks ago, Skagit County commissioners placed a temporary moratorium on the creation of any more mitigation banks on farmland. They're expected to make it permanent in July. That would seem to provide an exclusive Skagit Valley franchise to Clear Valley and a neighboring mitigation bank, already approved. However, a local non-profit land use organization, Friends of Skagit County, has filed appeals that temporarily block the county from approving the Clear Valley bank's required permits. Repeated appeals could tie up the project, and the investors' money, for months or years.
If such a mud fight was ever going to happen — farmland protection fighting wetland restoration — the Skagit would be the place. There are few soils on the planet as highly prized for farming as the silt loam the Skagit River has carried onto its flood plain for thousands of years. The Skagit delta is said to be among the top one percent of the world's classiest dirt.
Skagit farmers and their allies have led a decades-long political, legal, and emotional fight to keep housing and industrial development away from the best of the valley soils. Nevertheless, the county has continued to lose farmland. Friends of Skagit says its own survey identified 3,000 acres converted last year to some use other than farming. Some of it's gone to commercial and residential building, but more to highways and to wildlife habitat projects developed by state agencies. (Strangely enough, Skagit County's planning department seems never to have inventoried the county's acreage of usable farmland, nor kept track of how much is vanishing.)
Another farm advocacy group, Skagitonians to Preserve Farmland, filed their own appeal against the Clear Valley project earlier this spring, but dropped it following a deal with the investors. Clear Valley agrees to put almost $1.5 million into Skagit County's Farmland Legacy program to buy development rights to preserve valley farmland. (SPF gets none of the contribution). The bankers also agree to preserve some 225 acres of their 800-acre purchase in a conservation easement. In return, SPF withdraws its appeal, but only on the condition that Skagit County permanently prohibits any more wetland mitigation banks on farmland.
That looks like a win for those who demand no further loss of farmland, but it doesn't satisfy Friends of Skagit. Executive Director Ellen Bynum says her members will fight the Clear Valley wetlands bank so long as they can afford appeals to state and regional boards and to Superior Court. Friends of Skagit claims about 300 supporting members, muscle enough to take the Army Corps of Engineers by surprise.
"We were shocked at the opposition in the Skagit Valley," says Gail Terzi, the Corps' senior wetlands scientist in Seattle. "We never expected this. We can't understand why the ag community has taken such an uncompromising stand. Would they rather see the [Clear Valley] farm sold off as building lots?"
Of course not, Bynum says. "Gail's a good person; I've got a lot of respect for her. But her agency doesn't get it. This is not just anywhere in the U.S. This is the Skagit. People here know this is the best farmland in the world, there's only 83,000 acres of it left, and we're losing it at an alarming rate. We aren't going to let another 400 be taken out of farming without challenging the concept every way we can."
Beyond Clear Valley's 400 acres, Bynum insists, there's a secondary effect that moved Friends of Skagit to take on a fight which more prominent land use and environment organizations have stayed out of. "Every one of these mitigation banks makes it easier for developers to build, whether it's a highway or a shopping center," Bynum told Crosscut. "And in the Skagit Valley, where do you think they're going to build except on farmland?"
Terzi seems exasperated by this argument. "Not one of these banks is going to lead to more development," she said. "Wetlands banking is a way to make up for some of the damage that poorly regulated development has done for so many years, under the old way of doing things."
The old way of doing things is the pattern that still prevails in much of Washington. Too many developers and city administrators consider wetland regulations to be nothing but a pain in the anatomy of the local landscape. Wetlands continue to be drained and filled, and the replacement wetlands are often make-believe. Developers are told to mitigate by building other wetlands, but the locations they choose may have no connection to the wetlands being destroyed. Statewide studies done by the Department of Ecology say fewer than half such created wetlands work the way they're supposed to. A separate study found that only 3 percent of the mitigations in King County provide the benefits of the natural wetland that's been destroyed.
Benefits? Think flood control, water supply, fish and wildlife. Every natural wetland, from a high mountain bog to a scummy lowland pond, serves as a flood control device and water filter. These places and the plants that evolved there can reduce runoff at the rate of about a million gallons per year. Multiply that by the magnitude of wetland lossthat's been tolerated in the Puget Sound region in the past 100 years, and you begin to see why floods have become worse, Puget Sound water quality has degraded, and salmon runs have belly-flopped.
Under the new wetland banking concept, scientists at the Corps and the Department of Ecology supervise the mitigation wetlands, most of them 200-400 acres in size. They rule on the location, oversee the design, building, and operation, and decide when or whether the owner-investors can begin selling credits to developers. If a new wetland doesn't work, it doesn't pay off. The bankers fix it or forfeit performance bonds, which they have to provide early in the process.
"Under these new rules," Terzi told me, "we and Ecology have yes-or-no authority over these mitigation banks from the first day. First, the developers have to avoid the wetland if they possibly can. Second, they have to try to mitigate for their damage close to the development site. If neither of those is possible, then they can buy credits from a wetlands bank, at the ratio of three to four acres for every acre of wetland they're destroying."
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Jun 4, 9:55 p.m. Inappropriate
There is no science being applied here. These projects are mining soil and gravel – in the case of Clear Valley 700,000 cubic yards of the best soil in the world is being removed (that’s over 46,000 truck loads). Hmm, wonder how much that is worth in the market?
Washington State and federal regulators are pretending this is something new. Mitigation is over 30 years old – banking was started in the early 80’s. Washington is just one of the last states to adopt these practices.
Regulators and proponents are maximizing profits and minimizing environmental benefits. Excavation gains the applicant dollars – but it removes the organic soils that would make wetlands healthy.
They are sacrificing two irreplaceable resources for profits to the private sector. If the environmental “returns” are only between 3 and 50 percent, then I think this is a bad bet for taxpayers and Puget Sound.
Kind of sounds like sub-prime loans and Enron bookkeeping, doesn’t it – only this time it’s not just money at risk – it’s the health of the environment – and your grandchildren’s future.
Posted Thu, Jun 4, 10:19 p.m. Inappropriate
I've seen similar feuds, except between farmland and athletic field folks in King County. An unwillingness to compromise or work together characterizes these battles and is typical of any GMA-related fight. The GMA is pretty mushy about how to sort out the different claims upon open space. Because it is primarily a zoning law (rather than a growth-management law), farming and agriculture are always short-changed. Simply preserving land, and making it easy for farmers to purchase the land, is only a small part of what makes farming financially feasible. What is needed are price supports. Why aren't local farmers drawing on the billions in federal price supports that go to midwest farmers? Also needed is the agricultural infrastructure to process and bring ag products to market. Because this infrastructure is lacking and has been destroyed with our farmland-only agricultural policy, about the only sort of farming that anyone talks about is small-scale organic farming and small-scale "eat local" farming. The farmland preservation battle prevented the destruction of agricultural valleys ala the Kent Valley. Unfortunately, because it stopped at prevention and preservation, farming, farmers, and farms have been forgotten about.
As for our state and local wetland laws, as noted above, they do a very poor job of actually preserving wetlands (thus the need for wetland banking), and are a royal pain when it comes to permitting and development. Virtually all valley pasture land is really wetlands, and many hillsides and ditches are called wetlands too. When a landowner has a small wetland on his property often times the total amount of undevelopable land can mushroom because of buffer requirements which can easily exceed in square footage the area of the wetland itself. If a landowner wants to move a small wetland in the middle of a site to the site's border, that landowner is then hit with 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 replacement ratios that further destroy the economic value of the landowner's land. The law is the law, one might think, but it all seems so stupendously arbitrary because it's well known that wetlands just don't do well after development, whether constructed, moved, or sited nearby. A much more effective and practical way to increase wetland acreage is to use wetland banks, where fully functioning wetlands can be made to thrive.
Similar to wetland law is the salmonids in a ditch approach to denying development, whereby a ditch suddenly becomes salmon habitat in the eyes of an opponent of development. The blanket approach to zoning for both wetlands and salmon streams is a spectacular, legal and bureaucratic morass. More focused zoning of salmon habitat and wetlands would make a lot more sense.
As for the wetland bank/farmland feud, it's clear that undeveloped open space is the general commodity we're trying to preserve and that monoculture zoning of vast open space tracts creates real scarcities for all interest groups involved. Over half of King County is owned by government or land trusts. Government should make sure that we have plenty of wetland banks, plenty of grass fields for recreation, and plenty of farmland. If they abut each other, no harm, no foul. The Skagit Valley, as with other agricultural valleys, needs agricultural support for crops more than it needs more farmland.
In the Snohomish Valley I believe the number of dairy farms is down from 50 to 2 over the last few decades. The economics of dairy farming don't work for smaller dairies. In the Snohomish Valley, also, flooding is a huge problem. I believe it's a big problem in the Skagit Valley as well. Preserving floodlands for farming shouldn't be the holy grail. In fact, adding wetlands that can absorb some of the flooding makes a lot of sense. By the way, I believe part of the idea of a wetland bank is that they can also be wetland nurseries and used to better stock the many failing wetland mitigation projects that are implemented ineffectively to avoid the flood of lawyers who descend on violators of poorly written GMA law.
Upshot: Wetland Banks are good. Farms need price supports not just raw farmland. And the farmland-wetland feud is misguided bickering between groups who should be natural allies, and who should join with the athletic field folks to create vibrant mixed-use open space districts that benefit all parties involved.
Posted Fri, Jun 5, 9:19 a.m. Inappropriate
Over a period of 1-1/2 years, the St Petersburg Times published a special report on state and federal governments failure to protect Florida's wetlands.
The special report, entitled Vanishing Wetlands, is available on the web at
http://www.sptimes.com/2006/webspecials06/wetlands/
The intro states, Florida has more wetlands than any other state but Alaska. They stop floods, cleanup water pollution, and replenish drinking supplies. Yet despite government promises, they are disappearing.
Posted Sun, Jun 7, 4:22 p.m. Inappropriate
Wetlands mitigation doesn't work well, according to overwhelming scientific evidence. Most of the information I've read has sorry "success" rates from 23% to almost zero. In wetland mitigation banking, credits -- financial instruments – are exchanged for destroying wetlands away from the banks. Unlike the air one finds in toxic securities, WMBs are filled with water. Wetland Mitigation Banks (WMBs) are just wetland mitigation efforts with dollar signs on them.
DOE has received letters and testimony—repeatedly-- from the scientific community saying wetland mitigation doesn't work. That testimony has been ignored or dismissed. Could it be that DOE has invented a WMB theory and will only allow facts that fit that theory? It sure looks like it. Even DOE hearings are staffed by DOE representatives who have no degrees in science or possibly a modicum of scientific background at best, but who think Wetland Mitigation Banks are just fine. So how is transparency and honest public input served when the bureaucrats who are the water-carriers for the bankers are the ones who are listening to our citizen concerns? Do you think citizen testimony really means anything to them? It is just laundry list-style public process and maybe this is a scenario not too far from reality: DOE decides on a course of action after conferring with itself and possible WMB interests. Then DOE holds hearings to fulfill the illusion of public process. Then DOE comes to conclusions that lead it right back to its original course of action. Could it be that the only hard-core conferring done by DOE began several years ago with interests from the WMB investors themselves? Without an investigation we may never know.
I believe DOE has an intent bordering on a rabid crusade, to push the banks as a matter of policy no matter what the evidence and testimony shows. DOE’s
actions exhibit an arrogance which is not harmless. DOE is now doing damage to people's livlihoods and life quality. They are becoming onerous and dangerous.
The head of DOE, Jay Manning is not a scientist, he is an attorney. Could it be Mr. Manning is more interested in figuring ways around the GMA law than in living with scientific facts? Farmland will be lost if it is allowed to be flooded in Skagit County. Agriculture is the foundation of the economy there. GMA says to encourage employment and the character of rural areas. It also says that there shall be no loss of farmland of long term significance. It appears Mr. Manning and DOE are breaking state laws left and right in pushing wetland mitigation and have taken on the characteristic of a shadow government, surpassing the powers of our elected officials in the House and Senate.
If a state agency such as DOE can bend the law for special interests, then who is really running Olympia? And what mitigation scheme is next? Perhaps water mitigation plans so developers can go where they want? Is DOE really a Trojan Horse, put in place to destroy the GMA? Something sure stinks about DOE's view of our rights and what they think is their authority. Our elected officials should take on the responsibility of removing DOE's “special” powers and getting that bullying agency back in the barn with the rest of the horses. No wonder the public's trust in government to do anything right has eroded. Wake up, readers, what else does DOE plan to "mitigate"? I hope Crosscut will do an investigation on the workings of DOE. It could be of interest to the entire nation.
Posted Mon, Jun 8, 6:38 p.m. Inappropriate
Law and science have each played an active role in wetlands preservation and mitigation banking - alternating between war and a symbiotic relationship. Although mitigation banks certainly have their benefits, these benefits (easier enforcement of mitigation requirements, less risk, lower monitoring costs) are largely derived from the associated legal issues with mitigation banks. Additionally, as this article touches upon, the federal regulations must contend with independent state and local politics and programs who weigh the good of mitigation banks against other possible goods (such as agricultural land) and may not always come out on the same side as the federal government. William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review is publishing an article entitled, "Mitigation Banking: Is State Assumption of Permitting Authority More Effective?" that explores some of these interesting issues.
Check out a preview at, http://elpr.org/2009/05/20/mitigation-banking-is-state-assumption-of-permitting-authority-more-effective/
Posted Fri, Jun 12, 8:07 a.m. Inappropriate
There are a few identifiable reasons for the outcry against the Clear Valley wetland mitigation bank: 1) it is clearly against the Skagit County Code in force at the time of its original proposal; 2) it performs an end-run around the GMA; and 3) it will destroy, wholesale, part of the ever-decreasing irreplaceable Skagit agricultural soil bank.
Skagit County Code Chapter 14 Section 400 (and other sections) from 2006 are the guiding documents on the matter, and they CLEARLY do not allow for the massive grading, dredging, and land alteration that the Clear Valley proposals call for outside of lands classified as 'wetlands' in the Ag-NRL (for all of you all out there: Agricultural Natural Resource Lands Zone) zone. The site of the Clear Valley disaster-in-the-making contains approximately 60 acres of palustrine and riverine wetlands - wetlands, that, in my opinion, are degraded in function and could stand some restoration, possibly even with the intent of turning a profit on the sale of banking credits... if Hodges et al. had paid the market price for the farmland in question, they may have been able to turn a modest profit over the cost of the land on the sale of such credits alone. However, Hodges et al. were able to persuade, SOMEHOW, the Skagit County Planning and Development Services (that's the actual name of the government agency, I swear I'm not making it up) to conclude IN A CLOSED-DOOR NO PUBLIC DOCUMENTS PRIVATE MEETING that wetland mitigation banking SHOULD be considered a valid use of farmland. If these kinds of shenanigans don't inspire opposition at a grass-roots level, then I don't know what could. Also troubling: the DOE continues to endlessly cheer-lead the project despite KNOWING that it is against county GMA regulations - regulations that have cost the county taxpayers millions to concoct, develop, propose, adopt, and defend.
In addition to violating the county's zoning laws, the Clear Valley Project acts as a free pass around constrictive growth regulations in Skagit County: the proposed bank's service area would cover virtually all of the develop-able (read as: important, valuable, thought-worthy) Skagit Valley's cityscape. HOWEVER, the Project is located on rural Ag-NRL zoned farmland. In essence, we have the transferal of urban land values onto rural lands, again. If I purchase a swamp in the flood-plain south of Mount Vernon, and the city annexes the property (as it keeps trying to do), then I may go to the eager-to-please WMB team at the DOE and be cleared to purchase mitigation credits for my now extremely valuable land FOR LOTS AND LOTS OF MONEY. These buckets of money then go to pay for the destruction of farmland identified as aglands of long-term commercial significance. Dig it yet? Here's a kicker, too: both the DOE WMB team and Gail Terzi (despite her apparently convincing display of flabbergastedness) know that the land involved cannot be turned into residential, commercial, or industrial development. Period. Again, we have a community riled by interference in its just and well-developed laws by well-heeled outsiders and bureaucrats intent on increasing the sizes of their office fiefdoms. Oh, another fun fact: according to the Washington State Supreme Court - no slouch when it comes to understanding the GMA - there can be no preference in the application of any of the GMA's priorities. It is AGAINST THE LAW to conclude that wetland creation is more important than farmland conservation.
To address my third point, the farm under consideration for destruction sits on land not protected by dykes; in fact, it occupies land that has been used as a flood pool by the cities of Mount Vernon and Burlington under the tacit approval of the Corps of Engineers (there was a lawsuit about this some years ago). However, it has been a successful farm without the large-scale land use changes that characterize some of the fertile lands of the Skagit Delta, lands that were at one time tidal marsh. The soil is irreplaceable, light and loamy - even BETTER than the soil that everyone goes ga-ga over during the Tulip Festival. The farm's soil drains rapidly, requires no dyking (although this does expose it to some infrequent flooding events), and is exceptionally fertile to boot. The farm's location is even sheltered from hard spring winds off of the cool bays of the Puget Sound, allowing the soil to produce crops earlier and more abundantly. Hodges et al. and their phalanxes of consultants continue to insist that the site was almost entirely wetlands, that it is second-class in any way shape or form agronomically; they lie. Period.
I have seen the future, and it is hordes of people. Skagit farmland is a regional and national strategic, cultural, and economic asset. Destroying it is anathema. Illegally destroying it for urban expansion is doubly hard to swallow. I thank crosscut for bringing this article to the attention of the reading public and also I thank the author.
ps to Stuka: The wild diversity of Skagit agricultural production and its concomitant lowness on the list of counties receiving federal ag subsidies go hand-in-hand. In fact, I would argue that federal direct payments to farmers of the scheduled crops in the midwest has lowered ag profitability in western washington and lowered our ability here to be competitive against the major mega-farms of eastern washington, california, and the midwest.
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