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Government Watch
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers allows wetlands to go unprotected, GAO finds
On Earth Day 2004, President Bush pledged to create 3 million acres of wetlands in 5 years. Yet the effort by the agency responsible for preserving wetlands, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), is dismal, according to two new reports from the congressional Government Accountability Office (GAO).
In a report released on October 1, GAO analysts found that the Corps “is generally not asserting jurisdiction over isolated, intrastate, nonnavigable waters.”
The reason? Since early 2003, the Corps has required that its field officers obtain permission from Corps headquarters in Washington, D.C., before a permit to drain a wetland can be granted. But the project managers who handle these requests say they “are reluctant to assert jurisdiction over these kinds of waters because of a lack of guidance from headquarters and perceptions that they should not be doing so,” the GAO writes.
The confusion stems from a 2002 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court concluding that the Corps had gone too far in asserting its authority to protect isolated, nonnavigable waters solely on the basis of their use as habitat by migratory birds. It was this decision that prompted the Corps to require field officers to obtain permission to protect wetlands that fall into this category. GAO also noted that the Corps drafted but didn’t finalize guidance for its district offices about their jurisdiction.
In a second report, GAO found that the Corps hasn’t policed the mitigation efforts required by the Clean Water Act to ensure that the mitigation project, designed to build new wetlands to replace those destroyed, has been done.
Released on October 7, this report recommends that the Corps devise an approach that includes more specific guidance for the individuals required to develop mitigation projects, with definitions of key terms, including “substantial mitigation”, as well as clarify for Corps staff what kinds of mitigation oversight steps must be taken. “The Corps has consistently neglected to ensure that the mitigation it has required as a condition of obtaining a permit has been completed,” GAO writes. “The Corps priority has been and continues to be processing [development] permit applications.”
