The concept is simple enough: Mess up a stream or wetland with your development or road-building project, and you'll have to pay. In fact, you'll have to finance the restoration of an equivalent amount of stream or wetland elsewhere. In some books, that meets the definition of a win-win.
This so-called mitigation approach is required under federal law when streams or wetlands - precious natural assets - are damaged as the bulldozers come through. North Carolina has similar requirements that apply to endangered waterways.
Since 1997, as The N&O's Dan Kane recently reported, the state has spent $370 million on environmental mitigation. But the value it has received from its investments can be as murky as a silted-up swamp.
Kane described how a company that makes money by restoring damaged aquatic resources - streams, wetlands, buffers - can "double dip," essentially being paid twice for the same work.
A Maryland company, EBX, was signed this year by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to a $911,000 contract calling for it to reduce the amount of nitrogen entering the Neuse River basin. Nitrogen, as a nutrient typically from fertilizer or animal waste, can lead in excess to algae blooms and fish kills. Ideally it's removed by absorption as runoff flows through wetlands or vegetation. When development ruins those assets, pollution goes up; mitigation is supposed to lower it and thus cancel out the harm.
But EBX already had been paid $1.8 million by the state Department of Transportation for stream and wetland restoration (in Johnston and Wayne counties). The company then wanted to count most of that work toward the nitrogen reduction for DENR. The additional payment would compensate for office tasks and monitoring, but wouldn't result in any further actual restoration. So the value is hard to see.
Evidently such double-dipping is legal. It takes advantage of separate programs. But when Gov. Beverly Perdue found out about it, alarm bells appropriately went off. Overlapping payments for the same work hardly seem to pass the prudent expenditure test.
Kane's reporting on mitigation brings to light larger issues as well. The approach acts as a sort of escape hatch for developers and road-builders, allowing them to barge ahead into environmentally sensitive areas with the understanding that they can pay for the privilege. It thus lowers the bar on projects that perhaps shouldn't have been allowed in the first place.
It's true that the payments - or the purchase of credits from companies in the lucrative mitigation business - lead to restored streams, wetlands and buffers at other locations. That's fine, in the spirit of damage control.
But what's the true benefit from such restorations? In a Point of View article this week in these pages, Martin Doyle and Todd BenDor of UNC-Chapel Hill offered a skeptical view that deserves attention. A key point of theirs: government agencies don't have very high standards when it comes to certifying that a restoration project has succeeded.
"Neither fish nor aquatic insect communities, common indicators of stream health, need to actually improve for a stream to be certified 'restored'," they wrote. "... No actual data are required to show that water quality has in fact improved."
If the requirements for restoration were stiffer, then it would be more expensive. And as Doyle and BenDor argued, that would give developers a greater incentive to avoid damaging important ecosystems. A better balance between the economic demands of growth and the environmental demands of resource protection not only would be a plus for the state's natural systems on which so much depends, but it also might save the taxpayers a good deal of money.
