05/06/2007

Editorial

State lawmakers should dump DEQ's five-year permit plan

Giving people who have proven they can't be trusted a five-year window to further abuse Michigan's beachfront wetlands areas makes no sense; Michigan lawmakers should reject proposed new regulations that would do just that.

While they're at it, in fact, they should strengthen existing penalties for illegal beach grooming and urge Attorney General Mike Cox and local prosecutors to take the whole issue a lot more seriously than they have to date.

So far, violators have been faced with a lot of talk and little action, so little that it hasn't stopped them from doing what they wanted to do in the first place, regulations aside.

Back in November — over the Thanksgiving weekend — the new owners of the Cherry Tree Inn on East Bay sent a bulldozer into the water to eradicate plants that have grown there since East Bay water levels began dropping in the mid-1990s.

The penalty for that incident obviously didn't mean a thing. About 120 days later they did it again. In December(*), the inn sent two pieces of heavy equipment out onto the beach.

The inn didn't have a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in November and didn't have one in March. But all the Corps wants to do now is, true to form, talk.

"If they're willing to work with us and repair and mitigate the damage, that's what we are looking for more than anything else,” said Army Corps of Engineers spokeswoman Lynn Duerod. Why that is "what we are looking for more than anything else” and why the Corps believes for a moment that "they're willing to work with us” is an absolute mystery.

For its part the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality rejected the Inn's request to allow it to keep 90 percent of the work it had done and referred the case to its criminal division and the Attorney General's office for possible criminal prosecution.

That's good. We've seen what happens when the penalty does not reflect the crime — multiple offenses.

All that, however, makes it all the more puzzling — downright unbelievable, in fact — that the DEQ should now propose a system of five-year general permits for beach maintenance.

While five-year permits may be more efficient for both the DEQ and beachfront owners, they are also an invitation for past and future violators to spin or dispute enforcement efforts. An issue in the Cherry Tree Inn case was where grooming was allowed and where it wasn't; every year and every rise and fall in bayfront water levels would only blur the lines further. A five-year permit is a license to obfuscate.

The DEQ and the Legislature have been right to recognize the need of beachfront owners to gain access to the water at this time of low water levels. In dozens of cases, the only way to do that is to chop a path through new vegetation from the waterline of the moment to deeper water.

It is a balancing of the rights of property owners and the public; a complete ban on such activity is no balance at all. And for every violator over the past decade or so, there are likely a dozen who take their role as steward seriously. For them, a five-year permit would surely be a relief.

But the fact remains that there are enough violators in Grand Traverse and Saginaw bays, and enough widespread resistance to any regulation, that a five-year permit is tantamount to permission to plow; and plow they will.

Sooner or later the Great Lakes will — hopefully, anyway — return to levels more amenable to beaches and beachfronts.

Until then, however, the wetlands that have appeared along the lakes are key to controlling pollution and protecting wildlife, and must be protected.

We can't give people who have proven their contempt for those goals a free hand.