Mitigation banks multiply as the state’s coast shrinks

By Susan Buchanan
Contributing Writer

In Lafourche Parish, nearly loans first 600 acres where cows once grazed near Raceland are now cypress swamp and bottomland hardwood forest with oaks and maples, providing habitat for waterfowl, deer and rabbits. That’s all because of an ecologically oriented bank started at the site eight years ago by South Louisiana Mitigation, LLC in Mandeville. Companies, individuals and government agencies buy credits from mitigation banks to compensate for wetlands losses caused by their projects.

Raceland’s pastures were restored through the efforts of the Upper Bayou Folse Mitigation Bank, managed by Chris Trepag­nier at South Louisiana Mitigation. The bank was approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state’s Dept. of Natural Resources in 2006, and now has dozens of enrollees, Trepagnier said last week. “Obviously, we’re losing coastline rapidly in south Louisiana,” he said. “Lots of people have to mitigate for wetlands loss, including companies needing coastal use permits for their plants, oil-and-gas operators requiring permits for pipelines, and moms and pops building homes.” To meet regulations, oil company facilities in south Louisiana have mitigation plans, he noted.

Federal, state and local authorities govern wetland mitigation banks. The Army Corps and the U.S. Environmental Projection Agency began okaying them in the late 1980s. Louisiana has 126 of these Corps-approved banks now, and some of them are new payday advance responsible for huge tracts. In St. Charles Parish, the Paradis Mitigation Bank operated by California oil giant Chevron spans 7,100 acres.

Nationwide, about 1,000 wetland and stream mitigation banks have been approved by the feds to restore and protect a million acres.

Last week, Army Corps spokesman Ricky Boyett in New Orleans said a mitigation bank is created when an organization—usually a private firm although it could be a government entity or a non-profit group—agrees with a regulatory agency to restore, establish or preserve wetlands at a particular site. Under that agreement, the mitigation bank is issued credits based on the size and type of wetlands to be created or rehabbed. “Mitigation banking is predominately a private industry, and credit prices depend on such factors as existing competition within a basin, the wetlands type, and whether the bank is restoring, enhancing or preserving,” Boyett said. Credit prices are driven by supply and demand.

“In the last three to four years, mitigation credit prices in the area where our bank’s located have risen 25 to 30 percent,” Trepagnier said. “In some other areas, however, mitigation prices have declined recently.”

Buying credits from mitigation banks is one of several government-authorized approaches to compensating for wetlands loss. Two others are self-managed mitigation plans, or “permittee-responsible ez payday loan cda mitigation,” and in-lieu fee programs, Boyett said. A company or entity deciding to use permittee-responsible mitigation must design, build and monitor its wetlands-loss mitigation project and manage it over time. Alternatively, someone using in-lieu fee, or ILF, mitigation pays a third party a fee for the expected cost of replacing wetland functions hurt by a development project.

But all companies and developers, under section 404 of the Clean Water Act, must try to avoid intruding on wetlands before projects reach the mitigation stage, Boyett said. “If that’s not possible, then unavoidable impacts have to be minimized to the fullest, practicable extent for a zero net loss of wetlands,” he said. “This applies to any project, regardless of whether the construction agent is public or private.”

Recently, the Army Corps has had to mitigate for wetlands losses from the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity or LPV portion of the $14.5 billion Greater New Orleans Hurricane Storm Damage Risk Reduction System project. The agency received 26 responses on LPV mitigation in a public comment period last August to September, and it collected 52 comments from agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service and EPA. Last November, the Corps decided that it was in the public’s interest to buy mitigation bank credits for the LPV cash into cash project, and the agency said it would continue evaluating other aspects of its LPV mitigation proposal—including marsh restoration at Bayou Sauvage and the lake’s north shore. The Corps bought mitigation bank credits for the LPV project this spring.

Ben Grumbles, president of the non-profit U.S. Water Alliance in Washington, D.C., said “mitigation” and “banking” used together can be bewildering. “For Clean Water Act and aquatic impacts, mitigation is essentially about compensation—the actions permittees must take to pay for a project’s resulting sins,” he said. “Banking conjures up financial transactions far removed from the environmental field. But it’s a method of pooling credits, keeping score and consolidating efforts into defined service areas to get the most environmental bang for the buck.” Protecting resources in a targeted way raises the odds for ecological success. In comparison, a well-managed central park provides greater benefits to the public and wildlife than a hodge-podge of small parks, Grumbles said.

Trepagnier at South Louisiana Mitigation and Boyett at the Corps both said buying compensation bank credits can be a fairly quick and unencumbered process. For a list of Corps-approved mitigation banks in Louisiana visit the web at geo.usace.army.mil/ribits/index.html.

This article originally published in the July 21, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.