August 19, 2003
Wetlands battle: LaBelle confident Clous skirted rules, regulations
He says land clearing is not exempt from law
By
Record-Eagle staff writer
Dennis LaBelle is gambling $7,200 of Grand Traverse County funds to prove developer Bill Clous violated soil erosion control laws.
That's the cost of a study the county prosecutor commissioned from Gosling Czubak Engineering to assess the damage to portions of 360 acres north of Hammond Road and east of Townline Road in East Bay Township.
LaBelle is confident he can win the case and recoup the money in court, along with additional fines and costs.
The state's soil erosion control law was amended in 2000 and specifically addresses agricultural use, he said.
He pointed to two sections of the statute that describe what kind of agricultural use is exempt from the law.
The exemption includes plowing and tilling of land and harvesting crops. What's specifically and explicitly not exempt, LaBelle said, is the kind of earth moving that has happened at the Clous property.
"Plowing and tilling is not the same as ripping all the land apart, by ruining all the trees, destroying the wetlands and everything else," LaBelle said.
Clous and LaBelle are also at odds over whether Clous filed an alternative plan to get around the county drain commissioner's jurisdiction.
Clous and his attorney, Matthew Vermetten, maintain Clous is exempt from the drain commissioner's rules because he filed a crop rotation plan with the U. S. Department of Agriculture.
LaBelle maintains farmers must get an agreement approved from the soil conservation district in order to be exempt from the drain commissioner's oversight. He says Clous has never done that.
"There is no agreement with the soil conservation district because he never went to the soil conservation district in the first place," LaBelle said.
Moreover, the USDA agreement is not, as Clous and Vermetten had insisted, an adequate substitution, LaBelle said.
Buzz Long, of the USDA in Traverse City, said he told Clous that the plan he approved was not a substitution.
Vermetten said appropriate plans have been filed with the drain commissioner's office and with LaBelle, but he acknowledged that the plans were filed after work on the property was completed.
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