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Special report: Vanishing wetlands

Easier permits endanger wetlands

Developers want to bypass federal officials and speed projects. But that could lead to more pollution problems throughout Florida waterways.

By CRAIG PITTMAN AND MATTHEW WAITE
Published December 26, 2005

	[Photo by Bill Yates]
	An algae bloom on the St. Johns River had Jacksonville folks coughing and sneezing for months. Nutrient runoff helps algae grow, and algae consumes the water's oxygen.
	[Times photo: Lara Cerri]
	Veterinarian Octavio Blanco passes through the gateway that leads to wetlands on his property in Pasco County. Plans for a subdivision adjacent to Blanco's land include a 40-acre pit, which could drain his wetlands. Bloom Towns Florida's guidelines and the resulting toxic algae blooms Times special report: Vanishing Wetlands

Although federal officials rarely balk at building on Florida wetlands, developers are pressing for state authorities to get the final say for issuing half the permits.

That's because developers believe the state will approve permits much faster than the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that is supposed to protect Florida's swamps and marshes.

If the state does get the final say on permits for projects of 10 acres or fewer - and it could happen next year - it could spell further trouble for Florida's waterways.

State officials dispute that suggestion, but a St. Petersburg Times examination has found that when the state reviews proposals for building on wetlands, it fails to protect against serious water pollution.

The Times found that:

--The state's permitting rules for wiping out wetlands do not require developers to filter out the most common pollutant hurting its waterways.

--The areas of the state suffering from water pollution problems have also lost the most wetlands to urban development.

--State law discourages regulators from calculating the cumulative toll of issuing thousands of wetland permits every year.

One result: toxic algae blooms like the one that turned miles of the St. Johns River a soupy green this summer. The stench left Jacksonville residents coughing for months.

A spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush disputes that his appointees are failing to protect the environment from water pollution.

"Under Gov. Bush, Florida's wetlands and waterways are receiving better protection than ever before," senior press secretary Russell Schweiss said.

Yet the state's record is clear, said Wayne Daltry, Lee County's "Smart Growth" coordinator and former director of the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council. "We've got an area where development has increased and water quality declined," he said.

"It's the cumulative impact of all these projects that individually weren't supposed to cause water quality problems."

* * *

When developers want to wipe out a Florida swamp, they need permits from both state and federal regulators.

The state permit certifies there will be no violation of water quality standards. The federal permit, issued by the corps, looks at broader issues of environmental impact. If the state balks because of water quality issues, the corps won't approve the federal permit.

Although the corps rarely rejects a wetland permit in Florida, it has denied six this year, the most in 11 years. For all six, the state had okayed the development.

Projects approved by the state but rejected by the corps include a shopping center near Jacksonville that would have destroyed 167 acres of wetlands feeding a pair of pristine creeks, and a golf-course subdivision near Naples with a 3-mile-long flood control ditch that biologists feared would drain thousands of acres of nearby Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary.

How could the state approve development that the federal government ultimately rejected? Corps officials say state and local agencies lack the will to stop bad projects.

"No one has the guts to draw the line," said John Hall, who ran the corps' Florida permitting program until his retirement this year.

For 15 years, state and federal policy has promised that whenever wetlands are wiped out, developers would be required to make up for the damage so there would be no net loss. But a Times analysis of satellite imagery found that since 1990, Florida has lost 84,000 acres of wetlands to development.

The blame for that broken promise falls on every level of government, said Estus Whitfield, chief environmental adviser to former Govs. Reubin Askew, Bob Graham, Bob Martinez and Lawton Chiles.

"My bottom line is that the failure to protect wetlands goes much further than the corps; it starts right here in Florida," he said.

Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Colleen Castille contends her employees do a better job of protecting wetlands than other states.

Castille, who oversees the DEP and all five water management districts, said state officials are "committed to implementing the most effective, efficient and comprehensive wetlands protection standards in the United States."

The cornerstone of the state's permitting process is a document called the Basis of Review.

"That's the bible," said Clark Hull, in charge of permitting for the Southwest Florida Water Management District, commonly known as Swiftmud.

The Basis of Review outlines the criteria a developer must meet for dealing with flooding and rain runoff that result from wiping out wetlands. Wetlands soak up rain and filter out pollution. Destroying them means the runoff and pollutants have to go somewhere else.

If a developer meets the criteria in the Basis of Review, Hull said, then the developer has assured permitters he won't cause flooding or water pollution.

Consider Cypress Creek Town Center, a new mall that would destroy 56 acres of Pasco County swamps at the headwaters of the Hillsborough River, Tampa's water supply.

Environmental activists have been mailing in postcards urging Swiftmud to deny the mall's permit. Swiftmud officials say it's probably a wasted effort. If mall plans follow the Basis of Review, the state permit will be approved.

"There are rules set up so everybody knows what they have to do," Swiftmud spokesman Mike Molligan said. "If they provide that reasonable assurance, then they'll get a permit for the project."

But the Basis of Review's criteria for water quality haven't been updated in 20 years, and don't require developers to deal with Florida's most common water pollution problem: excessive nutrients.

* * *

The green goop first showed up in the St. Johns River in July.

"Then it just exploded," said Neil Armingeon of the environmental watchdog group St. Johns Riverkeeper.

Soon the slimy blue-green algae was everywhere. It clogged the river for miles, causing coughing, sneezing and skin irritations.

The cause: excessive nutrients, the product of fertilizer-laden stormwater runoff from yards, golf courses, shopping center landscaping and farms. So much nutrient pollution has been dumped into the St. Johns River that the river can't absorb any more, state officials say.

All over Florida are rivers, lakes, bays and estuaries with similar pollution problems.

In 1998 state officials drew up a list of 1,200 Florida waterways impaired by pollution. About 80 percent had problems with high levels of nutrients and low levels of dissolved oxygen. Both are manifestations of fertilizer-heavy runoff.

Dumping too many nutrients into a river, lake or other water body accelerates the growth of algae. When the algae dies and decays, it absorbs the dissolved oxygen in the water, suffocating fish.

The waterways in Florida suffering from too many nutrients or too little dissolved oxygen are all in areas where the state has lost the most wetlands to urbanization since 1990, a Times analysis found.

The Basis of Review used by various state agencies requires developers to treat runoff to clean up certain pollutants.

But not nutrients.

"There isn't anything for nutrients," said Tony Janicki, a St. Petersburg environmental consultant. "There's no required level of treatment."

So when state agencies say yes to destroying a wetland, they do not tell developers to clean up nutrients from runoff, which flows into already polluted waterways.

"What is going on now is not enough" to fix the nutrient pollution problem, said Damon Meiers, deputy director of the South Florida Water Management District. "New development is going to continue to contribute nutrients on a cumulative basis."

Individual developments may not cause much harm, Meiers said, but "when you add them all up, they still contribute to the impaired water bodies."

This summer, while the St. Johns was full of toxic algae, the St. Johns River Water Management District continued approving permits for new developments. One was for the shopping center the corps rejected, Freedom Commerce Center.

The corps turned it down because "we believe that these wetlands systems are extremely important for the lower St. Johns River watershed," said Col. Robert Carpenter, who oversees the corps in Florida.

Kraig McLane of the St. Johns water district said the state agency has been working on reducing the river's nutrients since 1993, but has made "no linkage" to permitting decisions.

"We're looking into it," he said.

* * *

In 2001, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional director John Hankinson became alarmed about water pollution in fast-growing Southwest Florida. He sent pollution expert Bruce Boler to "get tougher" on Lee and Collier county wetland permits.

Boler began opposing every large development project that would add nutrients to the western Everglades. Then a new administrator named Jimmy Palmer took charge and told the staff to go along with the state's wetland decisions. Boler quit, but he had sown the seeds of change.

In 2003 a Naples environmental group, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, filed a legal challenge to the permitting criteria the South Florida Water Management District used to approve wetlands destruction in the western Everglades.

The permitting criteria in its Basis of Review hadn't been updated since 1988 and didn't say anything about nutrients.

Rather than fight, water district officials voted this year to update their criteria to require developers in Lee and Collier counties to deal with nutrients - though developers in other parts of South Florida would not be held to those same requirements.

State officials have known for years that their permitting criteria were obsolete, said former South Florida water district attorney Marcy LaHart, who now represents the conservancy.

They failed to update the requirements because they feared developers.

"The political reality is that complying with more stringent stormwater criteria will make development more expensive," LaHart said.

Castille, the DEP secretary, denied the state does little to require developers to prevent nutrient pollution. But she said DEP officials are now considering updating the state's 20-year-old runoff criteria to "better address nutrients and provide even greater protection."

* * *

One reason state officials rely so heavily on their Basis of Review is that the clock is ticking. Unlike the corps, which can take years to decide on a permit, state regulators have just 90 days to say yes or no. If they take no action, the permit is automatically issued.

So state officials move as fast as they can. In 2003, DEP permits were issued in an average of 44 days.

State regulators are sometimes in such a rush to okay permits that they fail to fully consider the impact a project may have.

Last year veterinarian Octavio Blanco successfully challenged a Swiftmud permit for a subdivision to be built next door to his family farm in Pasco County because it would kill his wetlands.

The Ashley Glen development plan called for digging a 40-acre flood control pond near Blanco's fence. One of Florida's foremost hydrologists testified the 25-foot-deep pit would drain a swamp on Blanco's property.

Runoff from Ashley Glen would collect in the sandy pit and seep into the aquifer, rather than flow into Blanco's swamp, said John Vecchioli, former Florida director of the U.S. Geologic Survey.

A Swiftmud employee testified that if his agency rejected developments that dug deep pits in the sand that might let polluted water seep into the aquifer, Swiftmud would never approve another retention pond.

Five years ago, auditors working for the Legislature reviewed the state's wetland permitting program and found problems. A big one, they said, was that the state had no idea of the cumulative impact of allowing developers to wipe out so many wetlands.

Instead of fixing the problem, the Legislature passed a law that discourages any cumulative assessment and instead relies on bad science and creative accounting to cover all problems.

When wetlands are wiped out, state regulators look to something called "mitigation" to make up for it. Mitigation can mean building man-made wetlands, although scientific studies have shown that those usually don't work. Or it can mean simply preserving wetlands elsewhere, even though saving one swamp doesn't make up for losing another one.

But the Legislature said that so long as the mitigation is in the same area as the development, regulators must say the development has no impact. Since the law discourages regulators from ever calculating a cumulative impact, they don't.

The auditors from the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability said the state's wetland permitters try to balance development and the environment, but that approach "acknowledges that growth will entail some loss of environmental and wetland function."

The state's goal, the auditors wrote, is not really to halt the loss of wetlands, but "to prevent these losses from reaching a critical threshold."

--Times staff researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

[Last modified December 14, 2006, 15:33:04]