The Nature Conservancy's Jim Howe says that it can be difficult to get manmade wetland to take if it's on ground that wasn't wetland previously. PHOTO BY JEFF MARINI
The golden rule of wetlands, as every developer knows, is that if you destroy or alter them, you must replace them.
It's a practice known as wetland mitigation, and there are federal and state laws that govern it - the federal Clean Water Act is a major one. Those statutes apply equally to private companies and government agencies.
A few years back, the county acted on a federal requirement and expanded an airport runway. In the process, the county disturbed nine acres of wetland on the site. The impact couldn't be avoided, so the county built a new 13-acre wetland in Chili's Black Creek Park to offset the loss.
The county is now evaluating the prospect of building a wetland mitigation bank. That would be a multi-acre collection of manmade wetland, proactively constructed to offset wetlands lost because of future county projects.
But natural wetlands are where they are for a reason; they're often formed over centuries because of specific natural and physical factors. So when it comes to the effectiveness of manmade wetlands, like the mitigation bank the county's exploring, there are some skeptics in the environmental and natural sciences communities.
"I think the science would show that if you're creating a wetland on an area that's never been wetland, you're going to have trouble," says Jim Howe, executive director of the Nature Conservancy's Central and Western New York Chapter.
Restored wetlands typically come back very fast and have the same functional values that the wetlands previously had, Howe says. An example would be restoring a farm field that was drained from wetlands by removing the drainage system.
Wetlands are complex ecosystems with an equally complex set of defining criteria. There are different types - marshes, swamps, bogs, and others - but they do have common features like prolonged flooding and wet soils, says a fact sheet from the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Wetlands filter water, provide habitat for numerous species, and provide flood protection, among other important ecological benefits.
The performance and functions of the artificial wetland in Black Creek Park are improving, says Larry Staub, the county's parks director. The county's still tinkering with the design and is monitoring the progress, he says.
"It's something that's new and interesting," Staub says. "It's become a haven for wildlife out there, from waterfowl to fox, and we've had sightings of great egrets out there, which we've never had at Black Creek Park."
Scott Jones, a wetland biologist for the regional DEC office, says the project, while improving, has struggled because the site doesn't have enough natural water.
The county is exploring mitigation banking to offset wetlands lost during future projects, namely those at the airport and the Mill Seat Landfill, Staub says.
The project would not focus on mitigating privately-disturbed wetlands, Staub says. Some in local environmental circles are afraid that the county could establish a bank in a park and then sell acreage to private developers who need to mitigate a project.
County officials haven't selected a location yet. They've advertised for a consultant to perform a feasibility study and to help evaluate potential sites. Proposals were due on October 16.
Both the airport and the landfill are on the county's west side, and both are in the Black Creek watershed. To comply with wetlands regulations, the mitigation bank would lie within that watershed as well.
"It all has to do with soil types and the hydrology," Staub says.
The county has had discussions with the state DEC Region 8 staff about using a 25-acre parcel in Black Creek Park's south end for the mitigation bank. After DEC staff inspected the site, however, they told the county that the site didn't look promising. There aren't enough former wetland areas, which would make it harder for new wetlands to take, the DEC's Jones says. Department staff encouraged the county to look at other sites, and provided a couple of leads.
The wetland project in Black Creek Park is as an example of the difficulty the county would face building a bank in the park, Jones says. It's on the park's north side, next to DEC and Army Corps of Engineers wetlands. But it's in a drier area. Both Jones and Staub say the project's about halfway toward meeting its goals.
"That's been an ongoing problem for them and they're looking for fixes to that one," Jones says. "Why would you go try to do a bank in an equally challenging area?"
If the county were to build a bank, it would be under the regulatory authority of the DEC and the Army Corps of Engineers, as well as other federal agencies.
Developing a new wetland isn't as simple as picking a site and flooding it. Their complex ecosystems are maintained through a sensitive balance of different features. And getting that balance correct can take a lot of time and work, if it's achieved at all.
In 2006, the state of Ohio's Environmental Protection Agency studied the performance and success of its wetland mitigation banks. It concluded that approximately half of the state's mitigation banks were underperforming. For example, none of them provided habitat for sensitive yet critical frog and salamander species, says a report, and they generally had poor amphibian communities.
The blame, the report says, falls on a combination of poor design, planning, and management.
"What is needed is a re-appreciation that this is not easy work, that the devil is in the details at all levels, and that nature does know best (or at least is our best referent for success)," the report says.
The report's authors did say that manmade wetland mitigation banks can be successful in the long term, as long as they are sited, built, and managed properly.
Too, grouping manmade sites together has a couple of significant advantages. For one, pooling together multiple mitigation projects into one location makes monitoring and regulatory enforcement simpler - an important consideration given the dwindling numbers of DEC staff. Monitoring provisions are built right into both DEC and Corps of Engineers permits.
The banks also lead to more effective, successful mitigation projects. They help avoid a "puddle effect," where there are small, isolated projects that may filter water, or serve as a landing pad for geese, but have little other benefit.
"It makes sense for Monroe County DOT, Monroe County parks, the airport," Jones says. "These types of agencies are going to have projects that may require mitigation and having a mitigation bank up and running keeps them from having to reinvent the wheel with every permit application."
Wetlands mitigation banks are relatively new in New York. Rochester's Cornerstone Group, a private development company, opened the state's first bank in 2001. It's a 20-acre site located in Chili, on the southern side of the Rochester International Commerce Center.
Cornerstone pursued the idea of a mitigation bank out of recognition that building wetlands can be a complicated and expensive proposition, says Roger Brandt, the company's president. He tells the story of a former partner who had to buy three to four acres of land to offset wetland impacted during a project. The developer had to get regulatory approvals for the work and also had to put up money so that, if the project failed, the Army Corps of Engineers could fix it. [Disclosure: the Cornerstone Group is part of a team that's submitted a proposal for the county's mitigation bank project.]
It took three years for Cornerstone to get approvals for the mitigation bank from a handful of state and federal agencies, and they started selling acreage in 2001. Most of the developers who have bought credits have had projects that impacted small amounts of wetland.
"We took all of the risks," Brandt says. "If it doesn't work, it's our fault. You get your project taken care of."
The wetland functions well, he says. When the Corps of Engineers and the EPA inspected the project two years ago, they gave it high marks.
"One of the keys was, number one, the hydrology, and number two, the location," Brandt says. "We're over by the airport, backed up next to the railroad tracks, which contains an awful lot of wetlands."
The site has more than 100 varieties of wetland plants and attracts turtles, green herons, great blue herons, and a number of frog species.
"Once it took off, it was terrific. It worked out real well," Brandt says. "It's a very lush area now. It's fun to be over there when a big rain is occurring or has occurred. You see the water kind of picking up and moving."
Comments for "ENVIRONMENT: County considers plan to offset wetlands impacts" (6)
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Nora Bredes said on Oct. 29, 2009 at 10:00am
This article provides some solid information, but readers need to newsworthy points that have been left out. Notably:
- Monroe Parks activists, have been struggling for months to get information about this proposal. It came to light accidentally, only after a citizens was told about it by a principle of a consulting firm and then was anonymously given a November 2008 feasibiltiy study on wetlands banking in Monroe County Parks. This on-going struggle by citizens to get the information from the county -- and the county's resistance to providing it -- needed to be part of this article. Indeed, their activism is how City learned that mitigation banking was an issue at all.
-- By including the voices of citizen activists in your story, you would also have given readers concerned about the issue vital connection to an involved environmental community. Activists' website -- www.parkspreservation.org -- is incredibly informative.
Readers can see the November 2008 Feasibilty Study for themselves
-- You make this conclusion -- "That would be a multi-acre collection of manmade wetland, proactively constructed to offset wetlands lost because of future county projects." -- but don't quote your source. Is restriction only to county projects something you saw in writing or something you were told by county officials?
Please consider these statements IN WRITING about the project:
From Justin Cole's (Monroe County DES analyst) Power Point Presentation, Summer 2009 (You can Google it.):
"The site would be for both County Projects and some for public development."
AND, from page 8 of the November 2008 Feasiibilty Study:
"It is the opinion of both Steve Metivier from the Corps' Regulatory Division in Buffalo, and Bob Shearer, Deputy Regional Permit Administrator with NYSDEC Region 8, that the private market demand (emphasis added) for a mitigation bank within Monroe County is moderate to high (personal communications, 2008).
The feasibility study goes on to say that a cost/benefit analysis is necessary to "make an informed decision regarding the allocation of public funds to a project of this nature".
It's great City has begun to cover this issue; let's hope future articles will investigate the reasons the county has held this information so closely and if the County sees wetland mitigation banking in county parks as a source of revenue from other municipalities and private developers.
Steven Daniel said on Oct. 29, 2009 at 12:32pm
As a professional naturalist and educator, I recently visited the faux wetland in Black Creek Park. It is not a functioning wetland. The site is a dug out, mostly upland site. There are many upland species and some wetland species. It appears the county planners planted a few red maples and scattered some generic wetland seed mix. There is an abundance of species that do not otherwise occur in our area. The county introduced species that do not occur locally under the guise of wetland creation - a questionable policy that could have serious unintended consequences.
Mr. Staub claims that there is new wildlife at the site. I don't believe a baseline study was ever done. Is Mr. Staub aware that the destruction of the former upland habitat caused the disappearance from Black Creek Park of nesting bobolink - a declining grassland bird that previously nested in the destroyed grassland/field habitat. Is he aware that the Rochester Butterfly Club visited that site before it was destroyed, as Black Creek Park was one of the best sites in Monroe County to encounter some scarce butterfly species.
The article begs some of the bigger questions. One that comes to mind: should we be destroying existing park habitat to try to create mitigation wetlands? Further, is the county planning to generate revenue by selling mitigation credits? Is that what are parks are for?
Our Monroe County Parks are a treasure. Let's treat them with respect so future generations can enjoy them, and so they remain a repository of our natural heritage. That is what the early 20th century visionaries like Olmsted and Fairchild had in mind.
Christine Sevilla said on Oct. 29, 2009 at 1:45pm
I sent this message Wednesday morning as a letter to the Editor of CITY. Perhaps you'll read it next week in the print edition.
Dear Ms Towler,
After months of urging coverage of this issue, I was glad to see an article in today’s CITY. Creating wetlands out of upland habitat is fraught with difficulty and requires constant maintenance and upkeep-- unlikely to occur with reduced government agency staffing levels. I recently visited the mitigation “wetland” that was created by the county in 2006 to offset takings for airport expansion. (By the way, does anyone ask why our airport is so often under construction?) When I have walked in this “wetland” I have not seen wildlife within it. Nor has anyone witnessed the return of the increasingly rare bobolinks who once nested and bred in that field. And the McWetland seed mix introduced has produced a vegetation there that does not occur naturally in this area; one wonders if introduction of this new flora has the potential to alter natural wetland ecosystems in this area. A photo of the mitigation wetland can be found at www.parkspreservation.org; it looks like a depressed upland area.
Speaking of photos: Finally, and extremely misleading, the photograph used for the article shows a natural wetland, likely the boardwalk in the hardwood swamp at Black Creek Park. Instead of labeling it as the hardwood swamp boardwalk, it is captioned: “The county built a wetland in Chili’s Black Creek Park to offset wetland lost during the construction of an airport runway. County officials are now looking at building a mitigation bank to prepare for future projects. PHOTO BY MATT DETURCK.” What you depict in this photo is what is being destroyed! The photo communicates that is what has been created. No such wetland community, hardwood swamp, can be willed to existence in a few short years. I urge CITY’s photographers to capture some images of the mitigation wetland to reduce the confusion created by the juxtaposition of the misleading caption with Matt Deturk’s fine photo. Please clarify this visual information for your readers.
Sincerely,
Christine Sevilla
Kim Hartquist said on Oct. 29, 2009 at 2:38pm
This photo does a great disservice to the reader by captioning the image as if it is part of the mitigated wetland created in Black Creek Park in 2006, when in fact the photo is of a unique hardwood wetland " a disappearing habitat that takes generations to create " and one that is potentially threatened by the very creation of mitigation wetlands.
The current mitigation bank in Black Creek Park was created under the radar of any public scrutiny. When local concerned citizens heard that a new mitigation wetland bank was being considered in our Parks " specifically Black Creek Park, we began asking questions about this. How can humans make a wetland to replace one made by nature over many generations? Is this a valid use of our parks?
This article does address some of the difficulties over creating mitigation banks. Although Mr. Staub says he has seen a great egret there, this does not make this wetland successful. The area is barely a wetland by any measure. The jury will be out for some time on the success of the mitigation process or this project.
As for the valid use " or purpose - of our parks, we would strongly argue that parks should not be used for offsetting public or private development in existing wetlands. Mr. Staub, on the other hand, has stated that this IS a valid purpose of our parks. (Parks Advisory Committee meeting " Sept. 24.)
It is good to see this issue in the press since it involves a very questionable use of our County Parks. But we need to keep asking questions about this process. Will county parks be used? Who will benefit from this mitigation bank? County projects? Other municipalities? Private developers? This administration needs to be more forthcoming with the real intentions behind their development of wetland mitigation “banks” and whether or not our county parks are potential locations for them.
City editors said on Oct. 29, 2009 at 3:05pm
To the two people who have commented on the photo of Black Creek Park: the photo is just supposed to represent general art of the park. We've re-written the caption in case others found it misleading. Thanks for your comments.
June Summers said on Nov. 03, 2009 at 9:07pm
When the county constructed the mitigation wetland at the north end of Black Creek Park they destroyed valuable grassland bird habitat. The possible destruction of more upland habitat in parks to create poorly-functioning wetlands that will require consistent follow-up monitoring and correction to keep them functioning is a daunting task for under staffed Monroe County Parks employees. So far they have not been able to accomplish the monitoring and invasive plant removal necessary to improve the quality of the mitigation wetland that is already in Black Creek. Why should we think they will do a better job next time?
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