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Preserving Wetlands
by Mike Seager
The paperwork and
bureaucracy involved in a construction project is daunting.
Building a housing development might require dealing with
the local town’s planning, zoning, and conservation boards,
the state Departments of State and Environmental
Conservation, and the federal Army Corps of Engineers. All
of these organizations require different permits, sometimes
with conflicting requirements. Given the number of projects
that get built, and the speed with which they seem to go up,
you might think there is a honed and polished process for
making sure all of these requirements are met. There is not.
Consider, for example, a hypothetical case in which a
developer wants to build a project that will involve filling
a small wetland. To the casual observer, the project might
seem hard to hide from people in the town, and therefore
hard to avoid going through the town’s permitting process.
But the DEC personnel, who cover a large area of the state,
are not apt to notice that a new project could effect a
small wetland. It is the responsibility of the developer,
and perhaps the town officials, to ensure that the DEC is
notified of the project and that its procedures are
followed. Army Corps personnel cover an even wider swath of
territory, with only a couple dealing with all of western
New York, and so they are easily left out of the whole
process.
If the project’s contractor and local officials don’t notify
these other agencies of the project, and so don’t apply for
their permits, how do they ensure compliance with
environmental and other regulations? Obviously, they can’t
regulate a project if they don’t know about it.
This is where ordinary citizens come in, and this is a lot
of what the wetlands committee does. If there is a project
that seems to be in violation of regulations, the first step
is usually to figure out what agencies should be involved,
and then call them to see if they have issued permits for
the work. In many cases we find they are unaware of a
project, and our telling them about it is sufficient for
them to get involved and ensure that the appropriate
regulations are followed.
If you see a project that might be in violation of
regulations, whether it is destroying wetlands, not handling
stormwater drainage properly, causing erosion, or anything
else detrimental to the environment, make some phone calls.
The town planning board and the DEC are good places to
start. If you don’t want to do that, call somebody on the
wetlands committee and we will try to make some of those
calls. You can’t expect to block many projects entirely, but
you can try to ensure that they are carried out responsibly.
(For the wetlands committee, call Dan Grisley at (585) 671
5388, or e-mail Mike Seager at
mike_seager@alum.rpi.edu.)
    
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