MONROE – Newly planted pine, cottonwood and willow saplings strain for the sky on two old dairy farms near the banks of the Snoqualmie River.
A bald eagle flies overhead.
Soon, a muddy ditch that cuts a straight line through a cow pasture will become a meandering stream, wooing salmon, ducks and other wildlife back to environs that were once their own.
The rebirth of this 225-acre wetland south of Monroe could be the salvation of builders all over Snohomish County.
The owners of a Woodinville company have spent four years pouring more than $1 million into restoring this piece of flat lowland. They hope developers who aren’t taking steps to protect salmon on their own property will choose to fulfill their legal environmental responsibilities by buying an easement on the wetland instead.
Called “land banking,” the practice involves creating a large wetland in one location and selling credits to developers who are required to offset the environmental impacts of a Wal-Mart or Safeway, for example.
It’s the first time developers will have such a tool so easily available.
Typically, developers set aside a chunk of their own site for wetland preservation, a mitigation required by law. But many developers don’t like it because it reduces the developable size of their site and requires time.
By paying Habitat Bank LLC, owned by Victor Woodward and partner Steve Sego, $150,000 to $200,000 per acre, builders will be able to shift their wetland responsibility. They also avoid losing land on their development site to a wetland.
Habitat Bank is the state’s first private company to offer developers a one-stop shop for land banking, the state Department of Ecology, the U.S. Corps of Army Engineers and Snohomish County announced Monday. Any developer can apply for Habitat Bank credit as long as the proposed development is in the Snohomish or Snoqualmie river basins.
Wildlife agencies and some environmental groups look favorably on allowing developers to pay into land banks because the current piecemeal approach of having developers set aside wetlands on their development sites fails more than half of the time, mainly because the wetlands are not maintained.
A first for state
There are other land banking operations in the state, but Woodward’s is the first to meet local, state and federal environmental permit requirements with one application. It’s also the first to offer land credits to all public and private builders.
| Wetland banking
Are you considering land banking for your next project? For help, go to the state Office of Regulatory Assistances Web site, www.ora.wa.gov. It has instructions and forms and offers several ways to get help. |
“Truly, a lot of developers are waiting to see if it works,” Woodward said while trudging through the partially restored site Monday. “They didn’t think we’d ever get it permitted.”
Now that Habitat Bank is open for business, the question is whether developers will buy into it.
“I think it’s awesome that they did this,” said David Toyer, an Everett-based developer. “In some circumstances, it will prove something very valuable for developers to do.”
Still, land banking is uncharted territory in Washington state, so Toyer wouldn’t predict how well it will work. Toyer is vice president of Barclays North and the former Snohomish County manager of the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish counties.
Woodward will have competition; Monroe-area resident Dave Remlinger and a partner have a similar project they hope to launch on the Skykomish River in January.
“Both of us are in a position where the market will ferret itself out,” Remlinger said, adding that he will look at how Woodward does before setting his price.
Government has say
The Army Corps of Engineers and Department of Ecology will determine how big an easement a developer would have to buy from Woodward or Remlinger, said Lauren Driscoll, the department’s wetland banking program lead. She said each easement can be bought only once.
She said the ratios depend on the quality of land that is being lost and the quality of land that they are paying to protect.
“You have to buy slightly more or slightly better,” Driscoll said.
Having a large, continuous piece of working wetlands at one location is better for salmon and all the other wildlife that will use it, Driscoll said. Woodward’s property is part of a 600-acre piece of open space, and the Cascade Land Conservancy and a private duck-hunting group jointly own the rest of the land.
Wetland banking allows wildlife agencies to make sure the land is protected as open space in the long term, Driscoll said. After Woodward spends the next 10 years selling off all his credits, he will hand over the responsibility of permanent management and monitoring to the conservancy. He is negotiating with the conservancy over how much money to set aside to pay for that maintenance.
Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@heraldnet.com.
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