Florida is protecting wetlands while reducing regulations

Florida’s natural resources and the business community shared a recent victory. After four years of federal and state collaboration, rulemakings, public hearings and memoranda of agreement, the Environmental Protection Agency( EPA) approved Florida’ s request to move the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wetland permitting program to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

Under the leadership of Environmental Protection Secretary Noah Valenstein, Florida developed a state-level wetlands protection program that comprehensively protects Florida’ s water resources. Our state’ s decades of experience in administering state-level environmental permits mean Florida has developed the technical expertise to process federal wetlands permits while maintaining federal environmental protections.

The Department of Environmental Protection is staffed with geologists, engineers, biologists and environmental scientists who are experts in Florida’s diverse environmental features. These dedicated state government professionals know Florida and care about its natural resources. After all, they live here, recreate here and raise families their here.

Having Florida state government officials review projects and administer permits will be good for Florida’s business community. In our members’ experiences at the federal level, high staff turnover, workloads and cumbersome processes — not to mention the occasional federal government shutdown — lead to frequent and significant delays in the processing of permit applications. We do not generally experience those issues at the state level. Permits at the state level regularly arrive in advance of their federal counterparts. In fact, the two are often indistinguishable aside from the time it takes to get them.

Those issues are at long last resolved. Since President Carter signed into law the 1977 Clean Water Act amendments that allowed states to assume Army Corps permitting authority, only two other states have done so. Florida and its federal partners should be commended for the extensive work and public outreach that led to Florida becoming state number three.