Just Say Yes

One of the first states they mapped completely was Florida-an impressive accomplishment considering that, at the time, Florida had about 11 million acres of wetlands, more than any state except Alaska. Yet the National Wetlands Inventory biologists painstakingly documented all of it, from the dark tupelo swamps of the Panhandle to the sun-drenched tidal flats of the Keys.

The Florida map was done in the mid-1980s. Despite the state's explosive growth since then, that official federal map of Florida's wetlands had remained unchanged until two years ago, when the inventory's biologists checked back in on Charlotte, Lee and Collier counties.

The biologists were stunned. Everywhere they looked, wetlands they had mapped 20 years ago were gone, wiped out by shopping centers, roads and schools. Cypress swamps had been replaced by expensive homes perched atop mounds of fill dirt. So many trucks were bringing in more dirt to fill even more wetlands that it was like watching a particularly depressing parade.

"We'd pull over to do soil borings," says biologist Dave Lindsey, "and we were about getting run over by dump trucks."

This is what déjà vu looks like: On the eastern side of the Everglades, state and federal agencies are spending billions of taxpayer dollars to repair the damage done to the River of Grass by decades of exploitation. Yet on the Everglades' western side, those same agencies are allowing it to happen all over again.

"Haven't we learned our lessons?" the top Environmental Protection Agency official in South Florida asked in an

e-mail to another federal official. "Apparently not."

The federal agency in charge of saving the Everglades is also the one in charge of safeguarding the nation's wetlands: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps' Florida office is headquartered in a Jacksonville office building with a sweeping view of the St. Johns River, where the chairs, computers and window blinds all come in shades of gray. There, and in nearly a dozen smaller offices spread from Pensacola to Marathon, the 100 employees of the Corps' regulatory division spend their days reviewing requests to destroy Florida's wetlands.

They say "yes" almost every time. The Corps approves more wetland destruction permits in Florida than anywhere else in the country. Between 1999 and 2003, they approved more than 12,000 permits to destroy wetlands in Florida.

They said "no" to just one.

Environmental and civic activists complain that the Corps should say "no" more often than that. "They're flat-out breaking the law," contends Ann Hauck, an activist from Bonita Springs.

For 15 years the Corps' permitting program in Florida was run by John Hall, a crusty paraplegic with a dry wit and a degree in biology. Hall, who retired in January, contends counting permit denials is a poor measure of his agency's effectiveness. He encourages critics to look at how often his staff has persuaded developers to modify their projects to spare some wetlands.

But by that standard, the Corps' Florida operation still falls short. Nationwide, the Corps says it saved 20 percent of wetlands targeted for destruction. In Florida in 2003, the Corps saved less than 6 percent. In other words, of the 3,282 acres of wetlands proposed for destruction, Corps officials said "yes" to wiping out all but 185 acres.

Lee and Collier's wetlands have been particularly hard hit. In the last decade "the Corps issued more permits in Southwest Florida than in the rest of the Southeast combined," says John Hankinson, who was the EPA's regional administrator in Atlanta through the 1990s. "It was just a phenomenal number of applications."

Current and former Corps employees say their agency has failed to do its job in Florida.

"We're not protecting the environment," says Vic Anderson, a biologist who just retired after 30 years of reviewing permits for the Corps. "It's a make-believe program."

The government contends the destroyed wetlands were replaced, but many contend the claims are based on creative accounting and questionable science.

"It's a huge scam," says Steve Brooker, a biologist who has reviewed permits for the Corps for 15 years. While the Corps pays lip service to protecting wetlands, Brooker says, really all it's doing is "documenting the destruction of the aquatic environment."

The Corps not only issues more permits for wetlands destruction in Florida than anywhere else in the country, it also allows the destruction of larger swaths of wetlands. Corps officials in other states are astonished when they hear that in Florida the Corps is issuing permits for thousands of acres of wetlands destruction, says Charles "Chuck" Schnepel, a jovial, gray-haired veteran Corps employee who now runs the Tampa branch office overseeing the Southwest Florida region.

When they ask how anyone could say "yes" to wiping out so many acres, Schnepel explains: "The regulatory program doesn't say we're out here to deny permits. It says we're out here to process them."

Corps leaders insist that their Florida staff is doing nothing wrong.

"Our role is not to be an impediment to the development process," says Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, who as chief of engineers is in charge of Corps operations worldwide.

Yet even though they almost always get what they want, developers aren't happy with the Corps, either. They have complained all the way to the Pentagon that permit reviewers in Florida take way too long to say "yes."

"We hear home builders say, 'I have $2 million wrapped up in this piece of property and I'm waiting a year on the Corps,'" says Chandler Morse of the National Association of Home Builders.

Actually, getting government permission to destroy a wetland is supposed to be difficult. Once considered noxious obstacles to progress, wetlands are now recognized as valuable parts of the natural landscape. They prevent flooding, filter out pollution, recharge the underground aquifer and provide habitat for a host of species.

Their importance was underlined when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast this September. Scientists pointed out that if Louisiana hadn't lost so many coastal wetlands in recent years, the storm surge from Katrina might not have reached New Orleans, much less broken through the levees and flooded

the city.

Anyone who wants to wipe out a wetland needs permits from the state and the Corps. The state certifies that destroying this particular swamp won't lead to water pollution problems, and the Corps then must decide whether the project is "in the public interest" and will result in "no significant environmental impact."

Florida developers would rather have the state issue all wetland permits, because state law requires state agencies to make a decision within 90 days or the permit is automatically issued. The Corps faces no such deadline, and thus some permits-particularly for projects in Southwest Florida that wipe out habitat for endangered species such as the Florida panther-may take a year or more to process.

Developers have mounted a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign to have the state take over nearly half of the Corps' permitting responsibilities, under a bill that was sponsored by state Rep. Trudi Williams, R-Fort Myers, but mostly written by Florida Home Builders Association lobbyist Frank Matthews.

So far, the Corps has not agreed to the transfer of power. But after developers held a pair of closed-door meetings with the top Pentagon official overseeing the Corps-meetings facilitated by Rep. Ander Crenshaw, R-Jacksonville-

Corps officials in Florida are now considering it.

The Corps' permitting power comes from the Clean Water Act, which passed Congress in 1972. "The bottom line was to try to stem what the scientific evidence of the day showed was a problem: a dramatic reduction in wetlands habitat around the nation," explains Jim Range, who helped write the law as chief counsel for Republican Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee.

The trouble with the Clean Water Act, say critics, is that Congress handed the job of issuing permits to an agency that, since its inception two centuries ago, has built its reputation on draining swamps and altering the flow of waterways from the Mississippi River to the Everglades.

At first, despite its history, the Corps did a fair job of protecting wetlands, according to a congressional report by the General Accounting Office. But around the start of the Reagan Administration, the GAO found, Corps officials came to regard permit applicants as their clients and wetland permits as products to be pushed along on a factory line. Even today, along with every permit, the Corps' Jacksonville office sends out a "customer satisfaction survey."

That's because the Corps "does not feel it represents the general public or the resources it has been given the duty to protect," Anderson says. In internal memos from the mid-1980s, Corps officials state that their policy is "when in doubt, err in favor of the applicant not the environment."

And in a 1988 memo sent out to Florida Corps employees, John Adams, Hall's predecessor, wrote that "it is Corps policy: 'When in doubt, do not regulate.'"

The Corps training manual for Florida permit reviewers even says that projects that wipe out wetlands are presumed to be in the public interest. "Thus to deny a permit," the manual says, ". the burden of proof is on the Corps to show a proposal is contrary to the public interest."