Guest opinion

Ring the alarm

When Mike Mansfield retired to private life a reporter asked, "What do you consider your proudest achievement during your long public life?" He answered, "Saving Flathead Lake."

During World War 11 the Army Corps of Engineers proposed to inundate Flathead Lake behind a huge federal dam that would have submerged both the lake and the Flathead Valley from Polson to Glacier Park.

First-term congressman Mansfield pressed his case in a letter to President Roosevelt beginning with, "This is the most important letter I have ever written in my life."

Years passed, yet the Army Corps continues to be an agency that wields considerable power over decisions that involve alterations of the lake.

Although the north shore remains a largely undeveloped marsh and wetland, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Waterfowl Production Area, the rest is in private ownership.

Midway along this unbroken wetland lake frontage a developer intends to build an eight-lot subdivision. To make this proposed subdivision - called Eagle Cove - possible the developer has requested that the Army Corps allow him to fill the wetlands on his property and, together with several neighbors, construct a 2,850-foot seawall.

He proposes to mitigate for the loss of this shoreline wetland by digging a hole in a farmers field several miles distant. The excavated material will be used to bury the wetland.

The Corps and the developer will call this hayfield depression fair and just mitigation despite a proven record that these engineered wetland facsimiles fail or perform very poorly.

The Army Corps is considering this proposal under its 404 permitting process, which is a function of the Clean Water Act.

The Act obligates the agency to safeguard waters from degradation. It mandates that filling wetlands be avoided or where unavoidable that impacts be minimized or mitigated for.

However, in the words of one Montana Environmental Protection Agency enforcement officer I spoke with, "The Clean Water Act is set up to allow for development."

Although meant to provide for the privilege of wetland filling where unav-oidable, it's instead routinely exercised as the private property right of the landowner and against the public right to prevent water quality degradation.

When wetlands to be filled are determined to be irreplaceable the 404 is, in theory, denied. In practice the Corps has nearly 100 percent military efficiency in approving 404 applications.

Wetlands are recognized as valuable national resources for many reasons. Significantly they are water quality enhancers by virtue of their ability to filter and store nutrients, sediments and pollutants. Fill them, build barriers between them and the lake and the dynamic filtering features are lost.

Recognizing this the Natural Resour-ces Department of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, in it's position paper to the Corps remarked, "[T] he north shore marsh is of extraordinary significance. This marsh is irreplaceable, both in function and value."

The University of Montana Flathead Lake Biological Station, The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks echoed the tribes' concern for this critical north shore area to the Corps.

So important is the site to the tribes they offered to purchase the property from the developer to protect the resource. They matched his purchase price and included costs incurred to date, yet he declined the offer. The tribes and others are now asking the Corps, "Is the filling of this wetland for an eight-lot subdivision unavoidable?"

Long a favored encampment among the Salish and Kootenai in millennia past, the river delta and north shore continues to attract beach walkers.

Not surprisingly the Corps received nearly 200 public responses during the one-month period allowed for written input. Nearly all strongly opposed the development. Seldom had they ever received a public record of this degree.

Still no public meetings were held and no further notice of action given until two years later when word spread this spring that the Corps is soon to finalize its decision. Agencies with a stake in the north shore like the USFWS became alarmed when they learned that the Corps is leaning in favor of granting the 404 permit.

Under the Clean Water Act the Montana State Department of Environmental Quality has the authority to ensure that federal action meets state standards. The DEQ must take a careful look at the input of soil pollution to water quality when truckloads of fill are dumped into a wetland on the margin of a pristine lake.

This 401 permit, if denied, can fully stop the Corps in granting approval.

I sat in the office of a government official recently looking at the DEQ's charted record on various 401-permit decisions. As it turns out they get denied very rarely.

Entrusted with safeguarding state waters to ensure the highest standards of quality, DEQ has only a little better record than the Army Corps.

In fact the state regulatory officer charged with deciding the 401 permit for this potential wetland fill site told me recently that he saw no particular reason for concern about Flathead Lakes' water quality. However, he had not made his decision yet.

If not the state then perhaps the EPA has a role in this north shore story.

In Helena I discovered that EPA has authority to enforce violations of the 404 by vetoing the Corps' decisions, yet it has never done so in Montana and rarely does outside the state.

Instead the EPA works with the Corps to "coordinate and cooperate so as not to cause a delay."

If the agency determines that an aquatic resource of national importance (ARNI) may be at stake in the 404-permit process, it can initiate what is called a 404 Q. It is typically done in the public input stage.

I was disheartened to learn that the north shore project did not rate a 404 Q concern. The EPA was satisfied that proposed mitigation was included and that the Corps had provided for public input two years ago. In the opinion of the Montana EPA, "There was nothing to trigger any 404 Q action."

I was informed by the Denver office that tEPA is short-staffed and spread thin so that small projects like this one may go unnoticed.

Although not enough to warrant local importance if not "national importance" on the EPA work list, the proposed filling of a wetland and construction of a major seawall on the north shore of Flathead Lake has raised the concerns of many individuals and agencies who see this precedent as alarming.

Water quality doesn't collapse over-night. It degrades from a thousand cuts. Some cuts are heavy bleeders. The filling of a shoreline wetland is such a wound.

If we care about water quality in Flathead Lake the alarm needs to be ringing loudly in the state offices of the Army Corps, DEQ and EPA.

Flathead Lake could use a Mike Mansfield right now.

Joseph Biby

Bigfork