As Federal Government Abandons Wetlands Protection, Localities Become Frontlines

The March 30 announcement arrived with the bluntness that has become a hallmark of the Trump administration’s environmental retreat: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has served as the nation’s primary wetland guardian for over half a century, declared that it is “getting out of the business of regulating wetlands.”

This followed a seismic shift at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which moved to redefine which waters receive federal protection under the Clean Water Act. The 2023 Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. EPA opened this door by narrowing federal jurisdiction to only those wetlands with a “continuous surface connection” to larger bodies of water. The decision was widely condemned by the scientific community for ignoring the fundamental reality of hydrology: Water moves underground, it moves seasonally, and it moves through “isolated” pools that are nonetheless essential to the health of the whole.

Together, these moves are poised to strip millions of acres of wetlands — the marshes, bogs, wet meadows, and vernal pools that form the literal and metaphorical “kidneys” of our landscape — from fill, crops, and sprawling development. Now, federal agencies are careening through that door, leaving a vacuum where national protection once stood.

The question is no longer whether this withdrawal will cause damage — it will. The question is now: Who is left to stand between the bulldozer and the creek?

The answer is local government.

This is a story that requires new heroes. Nationwide, cities and counties are finding themselves on the front lines of an environmental crisis they did not ask for but are uniquely positioned to solve.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the American development ethos has been to view wetlands through a lens of nuisance, often dismissing them as “swamps” or stagnant wastelands to be drained and cropped or paved. But if you stand on the banks of a healthy riparian corridor — perhaps along the Yampa River in Colorado, the Great Cypress Swamp in Delaware, or the winding creeks of the Mississippi watershed — you see a different reality. You see a thriving, multilayered ecosystem where great blue herons and egrets find sanctuary, where trout spawn in the cool shadows of overhanging willows, and where beavers and mink utilize corridors as vital transit lines through an increasingly fragmented world.

Less well-known is how wetlands protect us, despite our many attempts to undercut their healthy functioning. As climate change accelerates, wetlands are one of the most cost-effective defenses. Functioning as massive sponges, wetlands absorb torrential floodwaters that would otherwise inundate our streets. In fact, coastal protection services by wetlands are estimated to have a value of around $447 billion per year and save 4,620 lives per year. They function as natural air conditioners, providing significant heat abatement in urban centers that are becoming dangerously hot. They are also carbon sinks, sequestering greenhouse gases far more efficiently than dry land. Yet, by withdrawing federal oversight, we are effectively designating these places as sacrifice zones — areas where short-term development pressure is allowed to permanently dismantle the systems that keep our communities livable. It is exceedingly difficult and expensive to bring wetlands back, and we will live with the consequences forever.

To combat this, forward-thinking municipalities are adopting tiered setbacks, buffer systems, local wetland mitigation requirements, and other efforts. These codes scale protections based on both ecological sensitivity and development intensity, protecting the most vulnerable inner zones absolutely while allowing for thoughtful, mitigated development further back. By adopting locally tailored wetland definitions, cities can fill the Sackett gap, protecting the isolated and seasonal wetlands that the federal government has stripped of protection.

The path to local protection is, at times, blocked by a different kind of barrier: state preemption. In some parts of the country, particularly within the 1.2 million-square-mile Mississippi River watershed, some local governments find their hands tied by state legislatures. In Iowa, for instance, state law explicitly bars local governments from regulating fertilizer and pesticide use that can run off into the local waterways connecting to the river. This is happening even as nitrate levels in parts of the state exceed safe drinking water limits, and even as they continue to contribute to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

This creates a tragic irony: Local taxpayers often foot the bill to remove agricultural pollutants from their drinking water — as seen with the Des Moines Water Works — yet their local leaders are legally prohibited from addressing the source of the pollution.

But even within these constraints, local authority remains a potent tool. If a city cannot regulate fertilizer, it can still mandate riparian buffer strips, as is the case in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Maplewood, Minnesota. It can require native vegetation restoration, as in Ventura County, California, and Addison, Texas, and restrict development on prime soils that are essential for natural drainage, like Whitman County, Washington, and Clinton County, Indiana. It can adopt rain garden ordinances and stormwater management credits that reduce the nutrient load reaching our waterways, as in Blaine, Minnesota, and Montgomery County, Maryland. These are not just “green” amenities; they are survival strategies for a more volatile century and a lackadaisical federal government.

But local governments have an advantage that a federal agency in Washington, D.C. will never have: community. The people who live beside these waters, who fish and swim in them, who raise children near them, and who rely on them for their literal and spiritual refreshment are more than just stakeholders. They/we are constituents. We can and must show up to planning meetings because we care about place with a ferocity that no bureaucrat living hundreds of miles away can match.

The front line of climate and wetland protection has moved. It is no longer in the halls of Congress; it is in the basement of city hall, at the zoning board hearing, and in the language of the municipal code. The places we love will endure only if we meet them with care, clarity, and the courage to protect them ourselves.

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