Wetlands. "Miffed wetlands owner halts talks" is the headline to this story posted on the IndyStar site this afternoon. The lead:
The owner of a large wetland area in southwestern Indiana said he was "disgusted" with a multi-million dollar offer from state officials and called off a potential deal that would have put the land into public ownership.Earlier Goose Pond stories: 7/8/04; 5/19/04.The 8,000-acre area, known as Goose Pond, would have been the largest single purchase of recreational land in state history, officials have said. The Greene County property, a former shallow lake, is being restored to wetlands and already attracts large amounts of waterfowl and other wildlife.
Owner Maurice Wilder phoned The Indianapolis Star today to say any potential sale to the state was off and he would auction the land Oct. 15.
More on Wetlands. A lengthy AP story today, dateline Fishers, Ind., gives an overview of wetland issues. Some quotes:
Following the Supreme Court's 2001 decision, legislative fights arose across the nation over how to regulate isolated wetlands in the absence of federal rules.[Update 7/17/04] The Munster Times has a story today that begins:About four months before his death last year, Gov. Frank O'Bannon vetoed a wetlands bill passed by lawmakers, saying it would not achieve its stated goal of "no net loss of wetlands."
In January, the Legislature overrode his veto, then passed another bill that addressed some of the concerns raised by critics and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.
Sen. Beverly Gard, chairwoman of the Senate Environmental Affairs Committee, believes the new law might have ended the long-running fight over wetlands between the General Assembly and IDEM.
"I don't see the Legislature getting into this issue for a while," said Gard, R-Greenfield.
The new law creates a three-tier system for regulating isolated wetlands, giving the highest level of protection to areas dominated by native wetland plants and which have experienced few, if any, changes to their original hydrology.
Timothy Method, deputy commissioner for IDEM, said the agency is working to develop a new permit system and rules for regulating isolated wetlands under the three-class system.
Those rules will be forwarded to the Indiana Water Pollution Control Board, which must revise and adopt them no later than June 1, 2005, said Andrew Pelloso, the chief of IDEM's wetland programs.
MICHIGAN CITY -- Save the Dunes Conservation Fund is encouraging citizens and local communities to become involved in preservation of isolated wetlands that it says state legislation in the recent session has threatened.Great Lakes. A syndicated story published here in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune reports that:
Seven Great Lakes states launched a two-pronged, legal effort this week to stop invasive mussels, fish and other organisms from being dumped into U.S. waters by oceangoing ships.Apparently, Indiana is not a part of either action. Posted by Marcia Oddi at July 16, 2004 02:20 PMThey argued that species from foreign ports must be stopped because they disrupt the ecology and cause billions of dollars in damage to industries, sport fisheries and taxpayers.
The attorneys general petitioned the U.S. Coast Guard Thursday to close a loophole that allows most ships from abroad to enter the Great Lakes without doing anything to remove or kill foreign species in their ballast tanks.
They also filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of a lawsuit by conservation and environmental groups. That suit seeks to force the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate ships' ballast water discharges in U.S. waters.
EPA released a letter sent earlier this year to Indiana's attorney general. It said that the EPA has been working with the Coast Guard to solve the problem. The Coast Guard said it will respond after it reviews the legal papers. * * *
Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York and Minnesota are part of both legal actions. Ohio's attorney general and Great Lakes United, an environmental group based in Buffalo, N.Y., joined to petition the Coast Guard.