Ch. 6— Impacts and Mitigation • 133 



(The) Corps imposes controversial and costly 

 permit conditions without assuring that these con- 

 ditions are, in fact, needed. The need for these con- 

 ditions, which are frequendy proposed by various 

 Federal and State agencies, is not substantiated by 

 site-specific data and research findings (12). 



GAO recommended increased site-specific inves- 

 tigation to prescribe impact controls adapted to 

 unique site characteristics instead of blanket stipula- 

 tions. This recommendation was aimed at the uni- 

 form application of partictilarly cosdy measures that 

 may burden the oil companies, such as seasonal 

 drilling requirements in wedands. However, GAO 

 admitted that without more research to substanti- 

 ate such restrictions, neither their imposition nor 

 the removal of blanket restrictions could be justified. 



Uncertainty of Mitigation Cost Effectiveness 



In the Corps' proposed regulations for processing 

 of section 404 permits, special conditions may be 

 attached "only to respond to effects and impacts 

 of the permit which are at least probable rather than 

 speculative.'^ Banta and Nauman (2) believed that, 

 "While ideally (mitigation) involves an objective 

 judgment by scientific standards . . . , it has fre- 

 quently become the last ounce of environmental 

 quality that can be injected into a project within 

 legally and politically acceptable hmits." For ex- 

 ample, a standard mitigation criterion in the En- 

 vironmentzil Protection Agency's (EPA) section 

 404(b)(1) guidelines is to minimize adverse effects 

 by "selecting sites or managing discharges to pre- 

 vent or avoid creating habitat conducive to the de- 

 velopment of undesirable predators or species which 

 have a competitive edge ecologically over in- 

 digenous plants or animals." This much sophistica- 

 tion actually applied to the conditioning of permits 

 would entail considerable subjectivity and specu- 

 lation. 



Clearly, there is more objectivity and accounta- 

 bility where mitigation is prescribed in more specific 

 terms tailored to local conditions, or at least to 

 regional situations. On the other hand, a total site- 

 specific approach would impose an inordinate regu- 

 latory burden on both the permitters and permit- 

 holders. Mitigation may not be cost effective where, 

 as GAO has pointed out, cosdy measures for wet- 



"Federal Register, vol. 45, No. 184, pp. 62, 757. 



land protection are requested without a site ex- 

 amination to ascertain the need in each case. Also, 

 requesting untested or (experimental) practices for 

 impact mitigation may be insupportable in view of 

 the proposed regulation to eliminate conditioning 

 of permits for speculative impacts. Unfortunately, 

 the followup evaluation of actual cost effectiveness 

 for classes of mitigative measures has been very 

 deficient. 



Management Plans 



To design a mitigation plan covering secondary 

 and cumulative impacts in an area subject to signifi- 

 cant development activities, a systemwide impact 

 assessment such as that provided by the Corps' 

 "wedand review" must be undertaken prior to de- 

 veloping an estuary management-and-mitigation 

 plan. The offsite, cumulative effects of many wet- 

 land fills within an estuary on basinwide tidal cir- ^ 

 culation and water levels could be controlled by lim- 

 iting the siting, uses, and overall amount of land- 

 fills. Through this approach, appropriate resource- 

 based constraints to development projects can be 

 identified based on an inventory of physical, bio- 

 logical, esthetic, social, and economic resources. 

 Objectives of the plan are linked consistently with 

 all project proposals, and the costs are shared equi- 

 tably. 



Management plans are initiated generally by 

 groups that have responsibility for local planning 

 and development. To help ensure that the plan will 

 be implemented, the sponsoring group may seek 

 the participation of the Corps and other agencies 

 with regulatory responsibilities. Management plan- 

 ning efforts can be particularly useful for specific 

 areas where pressures for development are intense, 

 there are constraints to development, and incon- 

 sistent policies and plans for an area make deci- 

 sionmaking especially difficult. 



Management plans can be used to define which 

 areas are to be protected or developed. For exam- 

 ple, the Anchorage Wedand Plan classifies areas 

 into four categories: preservation, which precludes 

 any development; conservation, which allows lim- 

 ited development with mitigation measures; devel- 

 opable, which allows complete draining and filling; 

 and special study, which requires additional envi- 

 ronmental data to determine status. The plan is be- 



