Experts Assail Proposed Rules for Wetlands

Experts representing four federal agencies have produced a blistering rejection of the Bush Administration’s proposed new definitions of environmentally sensitive wetlands after massive field studies from Florida to Alaska and Maine to Hawaii.

Hundreds of pages of reports, which the White House had ordered kept secret, characterize the Administration’s proposed new manual for identifying wetlands as unscientific, unworkable, and certain to cause massive losses of wetlands now qualifying for federal protection.

The dispute, sharpened by President Bush’s 1988 campaign pledge that his Administration would accept no net loss of wetlands, has steadily escalated into perhaps the most explosive environmental issue confronting Washington.

White House officials, concerned over the economic impact of aggressive wetlands protection, forced more restrictive definitions on the Environmental Protection Agency last summer. Since then, the EPA has received more than 30,000 comments for and against the proposed guidelines.

Meanwhile, as another step toward reaching final new wetlands definition rules, the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Soil Conservation Service sent teams to hundreds of sites to evaluate the Administration’s proposed new procedures.

Documents obtained by The Times Thursday showed virtually unanimous criticism of the rules that the Administration planned to substitute for those used since 1989.

After studying sites in California, Arizona and Nevada, one of the field teams reported that “the revised mandatory criteria, particularly that for hydrology, would eliminate from regulatory jurisdiction the majority of wetlands in the American West.”

“Generally,” the report went on, “the team found the 1991 version of the manual to be unworkable.”

In all parts of the country, field teams took exception to a proposed rule that an area must be inundated by water for 15 consecutive days and saturated for 21 consecutive days to qualify as a wetland and therefore be protected from development or alteration.

Evaluators who compared the new definition to the old at sites in the Corps of Engineers’ South Atlantic Division concluded that the new manual “actually deviates from accepted wetlands science.” Complaining that they found the document “confusing” and with “limited field utility,” they said that the requirements for 15 days’ inundation and 21 days saturation should be deleted altogether.

“There is little or no scientific evidence supporting a particular duration of saturation or inundation necessary” to produce wetland conditions, they concluded.

Overall, the reports added strong support to environmentalists’ contention that the new definitions would maintain protection for only the “wettest of the wetlands.”

One report from the field even warned that 110,000 acres adjacent to the Everglades National Park in Florida would fail to qualify under the new definitions and that 80,000 acres within the park itself would no longer be considered wetlands.

Increasing awareness of the loss of lands once considered swamps or bogs or prone to flooding in wet weather has emerged as a consequence of the country’s booming growth.

Aside from providing wildlife habitat and playing a vital role in the food chain, the areas contribute to flood and erosion control and to the recharging of priceless ground water resources.

It is estimated that the country has now lost half of its original wetlands and that it continues to lose some 290,000 acres every year. Wetlands now compose only about 5% of the contiguous 48 states.

The reports filed to Washington by the field teams include a litany of estimates of further loss under the Administration’s proposed new guidelines.

An assessment from New England was almost as grim as the judgment from evaluators in the West. After visiting 18 sites, the government experts concluded that under the proposed new rules, 15 would be reduced anywhere from 5% to 100%.

Connecticut, they estimated, would lose 256,000 acres, Massachusetts, 197,000, Maine, 1.6 million.

In the Corps of Engineers Missouri River division, 9 million acres of protected wetlands might be reduced by one-third, it was estimated. In the St. Paul district, another report said, “the result would be that the majority of wetlands would be incorrectly mapped as non-wetland,” adding: “The proposed revisions are technically unsound and unnecessarily burdensome. . . .”

In West Virginia, field teams concluded that none of the 18 sites visited by evaluators would qualify for protection under the new rules.

Given the furious controversy, the EPA took the unusual step of extending the comment period on the new manual for an additional 30 days, meaning that it will not close the books and turn to writing its final regulations until Dec. 14.

But results of the field tests and demands from Congress that they now be made public further stoked the furious political issue. More than 160 members of the House have signed on as co-sponsors of a bill by Rep. James Hayes (D-La.) to relax wetlands protection.

“We make the automatic conclusion that a wetland is better than what is around it,” Hayes told a House hearing last week, “and that is not a fair conclusion.

Times staff writer Michael Ross contributed to this story.