Just Say Yes

"Sometimes some of these projects don't work out the way we think they should," he says.

Sure, Florida has lost thousands of acres of wetlands, he says, but spending billions on restoring the Everglades "will be a key component" in offsetting those statewide losses. In the meantime, he says, allowing mitigation, even when it's flawed, balances environmental protection with much-needed development.

"People need homes to live in, hospitals to go to when they're sick and stores to buy food," Connaughton says. "As long as we support a growing population in America, there will be a need for land. We need to minimize the impact to valuable wetlands, but where we do have impact, mitigation is the answer."

Anderson, though, says mitigation is merely a way to make it appear the Corps is achieving no net loss when it's not: "It's all just a big shell game. Who's kidding whom? The only conclusion you can draw is we're losing it on purpose."

The pace of wetlands destruction in Southwest Florida picked up speed in the 1990s as the population boomed. Bonita Springs led the state in new arrivals with household incomes of $150,000 and above -business owners, entrepreneurs and high-powered executives from major companies such as General Electric and Kodak, all ready to plunk down big bucks on sumptuous mansions next to the fairway.

"Wetlands get dried up with money," says Bonita Springs native Danny Curran, a shrimper.

Upscale subdivisions-several of them built by a developer who later pleaded no contest to bribing county commissioners-helped to choke off the natural sloughs around Bonita Springs. When heavy rains hit the area in the fall of 1995, widespread flooding forced the evacuation of more than 1,000 people.

"Once it's full, it's gotta go somewhere," says Curran, who remembers water rolling over his truck's hood when he drove to town. "It lasted for two or three months."

To ensure the flooding doesn't happen again, the Corps and the South Florida Water Management District-the same agencies that approved all the development in wetlands-are now spending $30 million buying up homes and moving residents out of the area. Then the houses are torn down so the land can be converted back to swamps. Among the houses bought by the government was Curran's, even though it did not flood.

The same rains that flooded Bonita Springs in 1995 put the site of the state's newest university under three feet of water, delaying the start of construction. Wags dubbed the soggy 760-acre site near Fort Myers "Mildew U." A spokesman for Florida Gulf Coast University insists that the flooding was not a sign that the state had picked the wrong place to build the college. Still, he concedes, "there's an extensive amount of dirt that needs to be brought in as fill."

The FGCU site was originally supposed to be part of a conservation zone. It was prime habitat for Florida panthers. But politically powerful citrus heir Ben Hill Griffin III, whose company planned to sell or develop the 16 square miles surrounding it, was offering to donate the land. As a result, the Corps was under serious pressure to approve a permit for wiping out 78 acres of wetlands on the site.

At the time, Col. Rice ran the Corps in Florida. One day Rice was on an airboat in the Everglades when his cell phone rang. The caller, Rice recalls, began "cussing me out" for taking too long to approve the FGCU permit. The caller: Connie Mack, then Florida's Republican senator from Fort Myers.

"He used some terms over the telephone that weren't very flattering," Rice says. "It wasn't a pleasant conversation." Mack says he doesn't remember the call but doesn't dispute it. Rice approved the permit to put FGCU on Griffin's land in 1995.

The EPA has the power to veto Corps wetland permits. But the last time the EPA vetoed a Florida permit was 1988. As usual, despite misgivings, the EPA went along with the permit for FGCU. The man who made that decision now regrets it. "That's one we should have vetoed," says Hankinson, the former EPA regional administrator.

Since then, as critics predicted, development has boomed all around the campus, bringing in everything from the region's largest shopping mall to several new golf-course subdivisions, thus wiping out even more wetlands and destroying even more panther habitat.

One of the more controversial developments has proposed a plan to get rid of the flooding problems. The Mirasol development wants to build on 1,766 acres-1,500 of them wetlands. The developers have proposed building a ditch three miles long, four feet deep and 200 feet wide that would drain not only their own land but also the land for several other proposed developments.

But experts fear the so-called "Mirasol flow-way" would also drain nearby Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, an 11,000-acre preserve owned by Audubon of Florida. EPA official Bruce Boler also questioned why it would destroy 30 acres of wetlands preserved as compensation for an earlier development in the same area. "I said, 'How is this the least environmentally damaging site?'" he recalls.

A coalition of environmental groups opposes the project. Even Hall, in a private e-mail to Bonita Springs civic activist Ann Hauck, said it ought to be stopped.

But Mirasol has some important friends: former Congressman Goss and Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat. Staffers for both Goss and Nelson called the EPA's southeast administrator about the project and offered to set up a meeting with the developers. Nelson's staff also arranged a meeting in Nelson's Orlando office-hundreds of miles from the development-between the developer and senior wildlife agency officials to get them to drop their objections.

Mirasol has its state permit. But as of this summer, the Corps had not yet made a decision.

Southwest florida was supposed to be different-the one place in the state where three federal agencies became so alarmed at the loss of wetlands that they tried to stop it.

Rice contends that he was right to approve the FGCU permit because it set the stage for his next step: At Hankinson's suggestion, he ordered a full-fledged study of the environmental impact of the Corps' wetland permitting decisions in Southwest Florida. Launched in 1997, the study was finally released two years later. Then it sat for another two years before one of Rice's successors officially implemented its findings.

In the meantime, of course, the Corps kept cranking out more permits for development in the study area. Corps officials in Florida have touted the study as a sign of how progressive they are, noting that no other Corps district in America has undertaken a similar effort. But both environmentalists and developers say it has made no appreciable difference in the pace of wetlands destruction. Hauck, the Bonita Springs civic activist, calls it "a toothless tiger."

Count among its critics the man who asked for it.

"I don't think it has worked to slow the stream of permits at all," Hankinson says.

While the Corps' study was underway, Hankinson was launching his own Southwest Florida initiative. He hired a state water quality expert named Bruce Boler to open a Fort Myers office and told him to "get tougher on Southwest Florida."

Boler began questioning nearly every large development project that came through, in particular challenging assertions that wiping out wetlands would do no harm to water quality. He frequently questioned why the Corps did little to slow wetland loss, even preparing an eight-page memo for his bosses blasting the Corps. "The Corps was just rubber-stamping everything," Boler says.

Boler ruffled a lot of feathers. Developers complained about him to EPA higher-ups. Well-connected Washington lobbyists complained, too. So did Corps officials, particularly Hall. At one point he e-mailed EPA officials that Boler was "a loose cannon" and they needed to get him

under control.

When a more conservative EPA regional administrator named Jimmy Palmer replaced Hankinson after the 2000 election, Boler says, his recommendations for blocking wetland permits in Southwest Florida began to be ignored or rejected. According to Boler, Palmer decreed that if state officials had found that a development permit would not affect water quality, they should not object to it, either.

Palmer denies issuing such a blanket edict about wetland permits but confirms that he believes "it's not appropriate for the federal government to run roughshod over decisions by the states."

Frustrated, Boler gave up. In 2003, he left the EPA for a job with the National Park Service-to work on restoring the eastern Everglades.

The other agency that tried to take on the Corps was the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, first battling a development called Naples Reserve, built by Vineyards Development Corp. next to Picayune Strand State Forest. The developer wanted to build 552 homes and a pair of golf courses on 691 acres, wiping out 109 acres of wetlands in prime panther habitat. As mitigation, the company offered to create two acres of wetlands on the site and nine acres elsewhere, and preserve some existing wetlands. That net loss of 98 acres was unacceptable, wildlife officials decided. The biologist who reviewed it for the agency, Andy Eller, called it "one of the worst of its class."