Rules put in place decades ago to protect dwindling wetlands that help clean water and protect Florida from hurricanes and flooding face a new challenge.
State lawmakers now want to rewrite the terms for builders who purchase mitigation credits and allow them to "bank" impacts far from where wetlands are paved over. Rather than restoring wetlands locally and obtaining credits becoming harder to come by in densely developed areas, a proposed law would allow the credits to be purchased anywhere in the state.
Bankers could also sell credit in wetlands set aside for restoration years before actual restoration occurs.
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”This would allow them to basically pave wetlands in South Florida and replace them in North Florida,” said Audubon Florida executive director Julie Wraithmell. “That's cold comfort to a neighborhood in Miami-Dade County that starts seeing their homes flooding during thunderstorms as a result.”
The measures have so far been approved by the state Senate’s environment and natural resources committee.
By the 1970s when wetlands were protected under the Clean Water Act, nearly half the nation’s wetlands had been lost to farming or development. Even after the act, they continued to vanish in Florida.
A 1991 study by the University of Florida found that Florida lost more than 26,000 acres a year in the 1970s and 80s, amounting to more than a quarter million acres.
So in the 1990s, after the Environmental Protection Agency drafted guidelines for a mitigation banking system, Florida set up its own plan.
Banking was intended to ensure the services provided by wetlands — cleaning water, soaking up floods, helping keep coasts from eroding and providing habitat to increasingly rare plants and animals — remained in the watershed. In its study, UF found the loss of wetlands around the state had already disrupted large parts of the state. The Everglades had shrunk by 65 % . On the west coast, 5,300 acres of mangrove wetlands were carved into “finger canal subdivision.” About 12,000 acres of forest wetlands along the Apalachicola River had been replaced with pastures and fields for soybean and rice. Tampa Bay lost more than 80 % of its seagrass.
With banking, lawmakers found a way to let builders develop, while restoring those critical wetlands. Key to the work was restoring what was lost.
“ You want to replace wetlands with the same type that was impacted,” Wraithmell said. “So the idea is that you're not developing all of the grassy marshes and replacing them all with Cypress swamps.”
To do that, the state set up guidelines for land eligible for restoration and then drew borders for service areas where credits could be sold. So, for example, when Florida Power & Light decided to turn unused land in southern Miami-Dade near its Turkey Point power plant into a mitigation bank in the mid 1990s, the state drew a service area that extends along the coast to Krome Avenue and from Pembroke Pines to the southern border of Everglades National Park. The bank includes freshwater sawgrass marshes, tree islands and mangrove forests, similar to areas that have been paved over.
That’s allowed builders, like Lennar —- one of the nation’s largest located in Miami-Dade —- to pave over wetlands to build homes.
According to state mitigation ledgers, in South Florida alone Lennar has purchased hundreds of credits to build projects like the Grand Bay in Doral, more homes and a golf course in Homestead’s Keys Gate development and new townhomes in Homestead and Davie. Lennar did not respond to a request for comment.
But as the pace of development in South Florida soared over the years, local banks failed to keep up with demand.
In its latest report for a second phase of its mitigation bank covering about 9,000-acres and opened in the early 2000s, FPL reported that it awarded no credits.
Meanwhile, credits sit unused in the north and central part of the state, which has more than twice as many banks.
With the bills potentially opening up that space, environmentalists fear South Florida could continue to lose more wetlands when climate change is worsening impacts from more severe hurricanes and increased flooding from sea rise and changes in rainfall patterns.
Friends of the Everglades, 1000 Friends of Florida and the Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation also oppose the measure.
”When we embarked upon wetland mitigation, there was this understanding that we would replace type for type, but that also suggests that there is a finite amount of wetlands that we can ultimately allow to be converted. At some point there was the likelihood of bumping up against that ceiling and reaching the limit,” Wraithmell said. ”After all of this time, this bill basically suggests, OK, we're gonna move the goalposts now.”
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