Governor Mitt Romney has signed into law a pilot wetlands banking program for the Taunton River Watershed, a controversial move nudged along by a former EPA official whose environmental consulting firm is considering a bid to run the program. The program would let a developer build on wetlands and buy a credit from a bank or an organization that has restored wetlands at other locations. The measure, inserted in the transportation bond bill that the governor signed last Tuesday, was derided by environmental activists who argued that it will encourage private developers to fill in wetlands and that it conflicts with the governor's often-stated "smart growth" agenda. "If the governor wants to control sprawl and guide development appropriately, we should not be opening the door to developers filling wetlands," said James McCaffrey, director of the Sierra Club Massachusetts. The measure was pushed by John P. DeVillars, who was regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency from 1994 to 2000. DeVillars founded and serves as a managing partner of BlueWave Strategies, a Boston environmental consulting firm, which he said last night may bid to become the state's banker for wetlands mitigation credits. Besides the taint of favoritism, this is a step backward for Massachusetts at a time when the federal government is declining to protect wetlands. According to a report released by Earth Justice last week, the Bush administration has allowed valuable wetlands to be lost to development. The scientific evidence suggests that we are not able to restore or create functional, diverse wetlands, as is required by a mitigation bank. Rather than allowing wetlands to be destroyed under the pretense that we can make new ones, we should be vigilantly protecting the few intact wetlands we have left.

Ran 8/16/04