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Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Most of us would complain if police routinely ignored speeders and red-light runners. What’s the point of enacting laws and regulations, we would sneer, if police don’t enforce them?

Yet something like that is happening with the state’s wetlands laws and rules, as The Seattle Times is reporting in an alarming series that started Sunday.

“A lot of us have felt badly over the years that we are misleading the people and fooling ourselves that we are doing OK, that we are … protecting the important places,”  Andy McMillan of the state Department of Ecology told The Times.

The newspaper’s package — “Saving Wetlands: a broken promise” — is focused on the Puget Sound Basin, but feeds suspicions about weak enforcement of wetlands- and wildlife-habitat regulations statewide. Our check Monday on one local wetlands project added fuel to those suspicions.

According to The Times’ damning series, the 20-year-old state program to preserve our wetlands in the face of population growth and suburbanization of once-rural areas is a failure and “the management of wetlands in Washington remains in disarray. It’s part of a pattern of failure that taints Washington’s ‘green’ veneer.”

There are more than enough villains, real or perceived, to go around, including inadequate staffing of government agencies, the building industry lobby and inconsistent regulations. A hypothetical local example of that would be septic-tank rules that might be more lax in Skamania County, where the Washougal River originates, than in Clark County, where it flows into the Columbia River.

Another problem is failure of inspectors to inspect. “At every level — city, county, state and federal — job one for most agency staffers is promptly issuing more permits, not following up to make sure that mitigation intended to make up for wetland destruction actually works,” The Times said.

Locally, we’ve had issues, such as the unauthorized filling in 2003 of seven acres of wetlands to make room for the Costco store on Andresen Road. After the National Wildlife Federation complained to the Army Corps of Engineers, the case was settled. But David Martin, the Corps’ Columbia River section chief in Seattle, told us Monday that project has never been inspected to ensure it is doing what it is supposed to do.

“We have limited resources,” he said. “We consider compliance essential, but … we can’t always inspect every single project. We haven’t had our compliance (effort) up and running at full speed,” but he said he expects Costco’s wetlands to be inspected this summer. The Times said, “of about 700 projects statewide permitted by the Army Corps, only about 5 percent” get full, up-close inspections.

The message in all this is that we best not assume environmental projects will be done right or will survive the test of time. Enforcement of these regulations is a grind-it-out, never-ending job that we expect of our governments, just as we expect traffic cops to go after speeders.