If there’s one thing everyone involved in protecting wetlands agrees on, it’s that we’ve failed. Ask Pierce County officials in charge of protecting them and enforcing laws designed to preserve them and what you hear is likely to be alarming. Ask officials from the state Department of Ecology about efforts to replace the thousands of wetlands we’re building houses and shopping malls on and they’ll tell you we’ve failed miserably. 

Ask local activist Cindy Beckett what she thinks about efforts to preserve these complex, essential, natural systems in Pierce County and it begins to sound like an ecological apocalypse. 

 

“We haven’t changed our attitudes (about environmental protection) in this county since the 1950s when they straightened the Puyallup River,” says Beckett. “They’ve killed our salmon bearing creeks almost dead. We calculate that there are billions of gallons that should have gone into salmon bearing creeks and end up in storm water drains. Wetlands are getting destroyed all over the place.” 

The destruction of wetlands is illegal. Federal, state and local regulations designed to protect them are fairly strict and charge a hodgepodge of agencies with protecting them. Land developers and others who damage or destroy them without creating another wetland somewhere else are threatened with fines. But enforcement in Pierce County has been lackluster, says Beckett. Since she began following the issue in 1990, thousands of wetlands in Pierce County have been destroyed, she says, despite stringent laws designed to protect them. More often than not, the destruction is carried out by homebuilders and land developers. 

“All they want to do is build houses,” says Beckett, “and the water’s in their way.”

Ideally, county officials in Planning and Land Services and Environmental Services divisions would stop developers from destroying wetlands or demand that they mitigate the destruction by building another one somewhere else. But a report from local activist Al Schmauder contends that Pierce County officials have not lived up to their charge of protecting critical waterways.



Developers who filled wetlands with concrete, for example, altered streams, cut protected trees or destroyed required buffers between wetlands and development were not stopped. Few violators received fines, and even fewer were prosecuted. Some violators who were targeted for enforcement stalled the system for so long that chances to force them to undo damage were lost.

The report goes on to assert that wetlands were being destroyed because county officials simply hadn’t made protecting them a priority. 

 

Processing land-use applications trumped complaint reviews, environmental enforcement and other duties that might have preserved a few wetlands. County departments had no employees dedicated solely to enforcing environmental law. Thanks to the building boom of recent years, county officials under pressure from builders and various lobbies had placed an even greater priority on clearing a mountainous backlog of permits. In so doing, county officials scrapped a plan to hire a consultant to help boost environmental enforcement, including wetlands. The money was redirected to processing development applications instead.

“I don’t have any doubt about it,” said Harold Smelt, director of Pierce County’s various water programs, when asked whether emphasis on clearing development applications impacted environmental enforcement efforts. “We balance a lot of interests. There was a time when our highest priority was to process permit applications, which was an order that came down from the council (in 2005). At the time we were hit with our heaviest backlog; we had our busiest year. That really pushes enforcement on its back.” 

 

Smelt contends that lack of enforcement is not the root of the problem. Ask any developer, he says, and they’ll tell you that county officials are over enforcing. As far as he and his fellows in Environmental Services departments are concerned, the laws on hand are being enforced. What are lacking, says Smelt, are proper regulations. He, Beckett and others note that regulations vary from county to county and that benefits of enforcement in one county can be wiped out because a neighboring county upstream was asleep at the wheel one day. 

“Our job is to administer the rules the county sets, and we do that. But the wetland regulations we have don’t protect the wetlands,” says Smelt. “We need to do more.” 

In their defense, county officials have re-dedicated themselves to enforcing wetland regulations now that the building boom has ceased. County officials have mandated stricter performance measures for responding to complaints, demanding that staff respond to any wetland complaints within five business days at least 95 percent of the time. They also authorized the hiring of a hydrologist to help with regulation efforts. Unfortunately, county hiring codes don’t allow the hiring of a hydrologist. Thanks to some creative interpretation, however, Environmental Services was able to hire a wetland biologist to fill the role. 

Meanwhile, wetlands continue to get wiped out, says Beckett. And sooner or later the cost will rest with Pierce County taxpayers. 

Beckett tells the story of an apartment developer in Parkland, for example, who had a project approved by county officials despite warnings from local citizens. A few years later, locals discovered that nearby Clover Creek was losing water in alarming amounts. After receiving a complaint, state officials discovered that the developer had broken the bed of clay beneath the project that helped keep water flowing into the nearby creek. At taxpayer expense, a $17 million concrete culvert was built to divert the water back to the stream. 

Because county officials had approved the project, the developer who damaged the water system couldn’t be held responsible. 

The other costs

Take a walk just about anywhere in Pierce County and you’re likely to run into a wetland. They are fundamental features of the landscape and cover an estimated 938,000 acres in Washington, or about 2 percent of the state's total land. 

 

Wetlands function as a crucial link between land and water. They are transition zones where the flow of water, the cycling of nutrients, and the energy of the sun meet to produce a unique ecosystem that serve hundreds of essential functions within nature and within our lives. Wetlands are often called “nurseries of life,” according to an overview provided by the United States Department of Ecology. Wetlands provide habitat for thousands of species of plants and animals — water lilies, turtles, frogs, snakes, alligators, crocodiles, waterfowl such as ducks, fish, you name it. 

But wetlands don’t just provide a haven for birds, bugs and lizards. 

When rivers overflow, wetlands help to absorb and slow floodwaters. This ability to control floods can alleviate property damage and very often saves lives. In their natural state, small streams and wetlands absorb significant amounts of rainwater and runoff before overflowing. As land becomes more urbanized, developers and government officials intentionally alter many waterways by replacing them with storm sewers and other artificial replacements. When pipes are substituted for streams and wetlands, floods happen more often and are generally more destructive of land, property and lives. 

 

Wetlands also absorb excess nutrients, sediment and other pollutants before they reach rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water — such as the ones we get our drinking water from. 

Wetlands have important filtering capabilities that are essential to making water habitable for fish and other creatures and in making the water we drink, well, drinkable. One study found that land disturbances such as construction can, at minimum, double the amount of sediment entering streams. Increased sediment raises water purification costs to local governments, which use tax- and rate-payer dollars to treat water. Increasing sediment flow also requires extensive dredging to maintain navigational channels such as those used by ships navigating around the Port of Tacoma. Headwater streams and wetlands trap and retain significant amounts of sediment, saving municipal and state governments a ton of money. For example, a study performed in 1990 showed that without the Congaree Bottomland Hardwood Swamp in South Carolina, the region’s government would need to invest in a $5 million waste water treatment plant. 

In addition to improving water quality through filtering, some wetlands maintain stream flow during dry periods, and many replenish groundwater. Hundreds of thousands of Pierce County residents depend on groundwater as their sole source of drinking water. 

Despite the fact that wetlands are of unique value to our society, a 1997 survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that an estimated 58,500 acres of wetlands are being destroyed annually.

Working toward a solution

Talking to state Department of Ecology spokesman Curt Hart, the promise of additional enforcement as a solution doesn’t hold much water. More regulations might help, he says, but that won’t do the trick either. 

What we need, he says, is better science. 

At the core of wetland issues in Pierce County and throughout Western Washington is the failure of so-called mitigation efforts. State and federal law, he says, allow a developer to build on wetlands and assumes that development of homes, commercial and government properties will lead to some wetland degradation. But those same laws also require developers to offset the impacts of their projects by building another wetland somewhere else and ensuring that it serves the same purposes as the ones being destroyed. The goal, according to federal regulators such as the Army Corps of Engineers, is “no net loss” of wetlands. 

 

So far, efforts have failed. Big time. 

“We have been trying to require mitigation against wetlands that are going to be eliminated by development,” says Hart. “The problem is that mitigation only works about 50 percent of the time.” 

Mitigation and replacement efforts have failed for a number of reasons, says Hart — the least of which is our general inability to create amazingly complex ecosystems from scratch. Most developers who build on wetlands are following existing laws as long as they make up for it elsewhere. 

“Science and the law may not be on the same plane,” says Hart. “Since we’ve been taking inventories of wetlands, we know that in the past 30 to 35 years we’ve lost a lot despite the fact that the law says no net loss of wetlands. We had good goals. Science just hasn’t caught up.” 

Department of Ecology, in turn, has rededicated itself to improving wetlands mitigation efforts and making sure that “no net loss” actually means “no net loss.” The state is ramping up efforts such as the wetland banking program, which allows developers to pay into a fund that bankrolls building of wetlands by people who know what they’re doing, relatively speaking. Builders purchase credits from government agencies or nonprofits that have built wetlands somewhere. 

According to a report by Sierra Club, mitigation banks are becoming an increasingly popular solution to our wetlands issues. 

The local success of such programs might soothe some readers until they remember that building wetlands isn’t an exact science yet. Sierra Club researchers warn that mitigation banking needs serious scrutiny, lest it become just another way to grease the wheels of commerce while continuing to destroy wetlands. 

The organization outlines reasons why we should be cautious in adopting this latest golden child of wetland restoration efforts.

“Under the best of circumstances it takes many years and is unlikely to replace all of the functions destroyed by the filling of the natural wetland site. In the meantime, the developer will probably have been permitted to pay a sum of money and proceed with destruction of the natural wetland,” the Sierra Club report reads. “Federal, state and local agencies charged with protection of wetlands will be tempted to take the easy way out by authorizing payments to mitigation banks in lieu of emphasizing avoidance of wetland destruction or requiring onsite or nearby mitigation, which would more likely replace lost functions. This may be good for developers and convenient for agencies, but will be detrimental to wetlands.”

And while Hart contends that wetland bank efforts in Washington hold long-term promise, he also agrees that there is no silver bullet for this issue. 

“We can’t duck this issue; we’re not trying to duck this issue, and we’re not the only solution,” he says. “We have to work together with developers and communities and local governments. That’s the only way this is going to work.”