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May 21, 2004'After-the-fact' permit is shoddy public policyThis is probably not the way it's supposed to work.After a series of fumbles by the state Department of Environmental Quality back in the late 1990s, developer Bill Clous was given permission to fill wetlands that were part of a 20-acre housing development in Elk Rapids. In the spring of 2002, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declared it had jurisdiction over the site and ordered the work halted. Now, Clous is seeking an "after-the-fact" permit from the Corps to continue work at the site, in essence an official absolution for work that shouldn't have been allowed in the first place. It's a backward way to do public business that subverts the entire premise of environmental regulations - preventing damage before it's done, preserving lakes and rivers and forests before they're damaged, not later. The entire incident points up ever more clearly the need for the state and individual counties to take up the task of monitoring - and preserving - smaller wetlands that fall under the radar of current state law. All of this could have been avoided if the DEQ had taken the spirit of Michigan's wetlands protections laws as seriously as it did the letter of those laws. In this case, the DEQ looked at the site and determined that the wetlands in question were not "contiguous to an inland lake or stream, or Lake Michigan," a DEQ official wrote in 1997. This was despite the fact that the wetlands lay off Fourth Street, within a few blocks of Lake Michigan and Elk Lake and were likely linked through underground aquifers to either lake - as the Corps later ruled. If the premise of the DEQ's work at the time had been to protect first and grant permits later, it would have been reasonable for them to call in the Army Corps and ensure that their determination was correct before work began. In fact, if the Village of Elk Rapids had not allowed a firm doing dredging work in the harbor to improperly dump some of the "spoils" at the Fourth Street site, the case probably wouldn't have come to the Army Corps' attention at all. Now, Clous is seeking a permit that would include "some elements of mitigation," which presumably will include restoration or replacement of some of the filled wetlands. That's hardly a "first do no harm" approach. Clous certainly has every right to develop land where zoning and wetlands regulations allow. But unless officials charged with enforcing those regulations do their jobs with the same zeal that developers bring, the system won't work.
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