re: Attorney recommendations wetland mitigation and servitude issues.

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Jesus Christ, ya'll need a new enviro guy. Extremely unethical, and a good way to get your arse in a vise with the wrong Corps analyst. Those guys have maps/imagery at their disposal that the general public does not, and many of them are environmentalists to the max.

I can think of 2 or 3 in LA right off the top of my head that would find that in a heartbeat.

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You're right to a degree, but a Good Environmental firm knows how to play the game. The bottom line is that a wetland determination/delineation is a 3 legged stool. Remove any of those legs and it doesn't meet and of the 3 requirements (vegetation, solis, hydrology), then it's not a jurisdictional wetland. For example, if you can prove the hydrology is man made, and remove that hydrology, it's no longer a wetland. The same with the vegetation. If you can naturally convert it (usually by removing/restoring the hydrology to it's natural state), then it's not a wetland. IMHO, after many years in the business 20 years ago, a true wetland scientist earns his bread an butter by their knowledge of the soils. Since the soils take dozens to hundreds of years to form, they tell the true story of the history of the site.

I did most of my delineation work in the intermountain west, but also worked on the NC coast. Those two environments are vastly different, but the concepts are the same. Assuming they've not been tilled into oblivion, a good wetlands scientist can tell how long and how often a site has been wet. I've seen good ones take their case to the Corps and convince them because the evidence is there. We like to get distracted by water and the vegetation on a site, and the "worst" ones to deal with are ones that you are looking at in the late summer and are all factitive plants. In those cases 1 or 2 upland or wetland species in a transect can tip a site one way or the other. But soils tell the true story. They generally don't change.