By William Lider / Herald Forum
Snohomish County’s award for the Little Bear Creek advanced mitigation site reported in The Herald article only tells part of the story (“County wins award for Little Bear Creek wetland restoration,” The Herald, July 30). The county seeks to hide the true, insidious nature of this project.
So how could anyone be opposed to creating new wetlands? When these wetlands are created as faux mitigation for development projects that will harm streams and wetlands miles away from the Little Bear Creek site with zero, nada, zilch mitigation benefit.
Don’t get me wrong; I am not opposed to development, being a professional civil engineer for 40-plus years, I have worked my entire career in construction. What I am opposed to is irresponsible development.
The Little Bear Creek site is located at the mouth of Little Bear Creek, where it will not provide any flood attenuation, water quality enhancement, wildlife habitat or fisheries benefit upstream. Yet Snohomish County will use its banked mitigation credits for wetland destruction in streams miles away such as Swamp Creek, Big Bear Creek, North Creek or even as far away as the Paine Field airport, falsely claiming mitigation for lost wetlands when no mitigation is actually provided.
The entire wetland mitigation banking process is flawed and was only proposed as a cheap fig-leaf to allow wetland destruction throughout the watershed to promote irresponsible development. The state administrative code mandates that the mitigation bank credits demonstrate that the ecological and hydrological benefits of the bank extend beyond the bank site location.
So how does the county get away with mitigation banking scheme without actually demonstrating ecological and hydrological benefits? Because the county has a building department that will not enforce the law and a hearing examiner who favors development over environmental protection.
In an episode from “The Simpsons,” Montgomery Burns drives a dump truck up to Lake Springfield loaded with barrels of leaking, green-glowing, radioactive waste. The sign at the lake says, “No Dumping, $10,000 Fine.” Mr. Burns then dumps all the drums into the lake, reaches into his vest pocket, pulls out $10,000, and flings the bills into the lake. This is exactly what Snohomish County is doing with the Little Bear Creek mitigation site.
Please let County Executive Dave Somers (County.executive@co.snohomish.wa.us) know that this ecologically worthless mitigation banking scheme should be scrapped, and that any wetland mitigation must be in the same stream basin and in close proximity to the wetlands it is intended to restore.
William Lider is a professional engineer at Lider Engineering. He lives in Lynnwood.
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