EPA Wetlands Proposal

I'm generally against things that could lead to more permanent development of habitat.

You have a back story or a little more specifics?

What seems like a million years ago now, I used to do a little wetlands work. Anyone who's ever dealt with a mitigation bank will tell you, there are two side to the "Wetlands" coin. Acreage and function. The proposal leaves high value/function wetlands in place and sacrifices the lower functioning isolated wetlands that are not directly connected to waters of the US. Politics is about striking a balance, and I think this tule likely accomplishes that. However, from a sportsman only point of view, there are lots of small isolated wetlands in the Midwest/parries that are vitally important to migrating waterfowl. I'd be worried if we lost too many of those.

One of my most involved cases was a claim for damages to a wetland mitigation bank by crop overspray. My first ever overspray case just had to be one involving this complicated and massive contract with a lawyer as the owner. I went from not knowing these even existed to knowing a bunch in a very short time. This guy was making a lot of money by targeting unproductive farm land that probably never should have been cleared in the first place.

The proposal will knock back restrictions.

Yes Ron, thank you for the comment.

It is estimated that 59% of Louisiana wetlands are located in non-coastal inland swamps that could become open for development under this new proposal. At present much of the property that falls under the definition of wetlands are well-drained areas called "pimple mounds." Between these elevated areas are spaces that can become saturated with rainwater.

Under the new proposal the wetlands area would have to be touching visible water surface at least part of the year under a typical season. We may hear it called "the continuous surface rule."

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complicated and massive contract

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the MBI?

Flood 2.0 was designed to make coverage prohibitively expensive while making every other policy prohibitively expensive.

There's a big difference between how a regulation is written and how it gets implemented.

The Corps has been more or less implementing this proposed rule since April(-ish?), and as seems to be the case with any federal regulation, each district has their own take on things. We've seen instances recently where they seem to be implementing almost no differently than pre-Sackett. Some refuse to exclude ephemeral features without a request for an Approved Jurisdictional Determination.

The way the proposed regulation is written, there will still be alot of gray area as to how the jurisdictional areas are determined. It essentially boils down to what the area looks like in the wet season, but as anyone who's done wetland delineations knows, you aren't always out at that time of year, conditions are rarely "normal", and everyone interprets indicators differently. This new definition is much more similar to how NRCS does wetland delineations, which is quite different than the traditional CWA delineation (even though NRCS uses Corps methods). Most private practitioners aren't well versed in the procedures, which will be a problem. Most people want to just run out in the field, collect data, and make a delineation. This is going to make it much harder to do that if you want to "exclude" some areas from CWA jurisdiction, especially in forested landscapes.

And the reality is, groups will find liberal judges to bring cases before as soon as it goes final, and this thing likely won't see the light of day. The most recent version of the Clean Water Rule was never implemented in over half the country.

Yes, the property is in SWLA (Calcasieu Parish).