Coming out on top
Developers, not farmers, get biggest hit from wetlands rule
President Donald Trump often points to farmers as among the biggest winners from the administration’s proposed rollback of federal protections for wetlands and waterways across the country.
But under longstanding federal law and rules, farmers and farmland already are exempt from most of the regulatory hurdles on behalf of wetlands that the Trump administration is targeting. Because of that, environmental groups long have argued that builders, oil and gas drillers and other industry owners would be the big winners if the government adopts the pending rollback, making it easier to fill in bogs, creeks and streams for plowing, drilling, mining or building.
Government numbers released last month support that argument.
Real estate developers and those in other business sectors take out substantially more permits than farmers for projects impinging on wetlands, creeks, and streams, and who stand to reap the biggest regulatory and financial relief from the Trump administration’s rollback of wetlands protections.
But Trump and his administration put farmers front and centre as beneficiaries of the proposed rollback because of the strong regard Americans historically hold for farming, opponents say. Trump was scheduled to speak Monday to a national farm convention.
“The administration understands good optics in surrounding themselves with farmers,” in proposing the rollback, said Geoff Gisler, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “Surrounding themselves with folks that would represent the industries that actually benefit would not be as good an optic.”
Backers “have been really happy to have farmers be the face of it,” said Kenneth Kopocis, the Environmental Protection Agency’s deputy assistant administrator for water under the Obama administration. But the building industry, oil and gas and others with lower profiles in the campaign “are going to be some of the big beneficiaries.”
The more than 300-page financial analysis the administration released last month when it formally proposed the rollback appears to starkly quantify that disparity. Of 248,688 federal permits issued from 2011 to 2015 for work that would deposit dirt or other fill into protected wetlands, streams and shorelines, the federal government on average required home builders and other developers to do some kind of mitigation - pay to restore a wetland elsewhere, generally - an average of 990 times a year, nationwide, according to the government’s analysis.
In all, other industries and agriculture obtained an average of 3,163 such wetlands permits with some kind of extra payment or other mitigation strings attached each year.