A recent Supreme Court ruling rolled back federal protections for wetlands across the country. But here in Oregon, a state law from 1967 means wetlands and waterways are keeping their protected status.
“Oregon actually has a very robust state program and state laws that protect wetlands and waterways, independent of the federal Clean Water Act,” said Bill Ryan, deputy director of the Oregon Department of State Lands. “Relative to the rest of the country, Oregon is actually in really good shape.”
Oregon’s law is called the Removal Fill Act. It requires anyone who wants to remove or fill materials from a wetland to secure a state permit. This is true for both private individuals and public agencies.
Wetlands are key habitats for native species like birds and juvenile fish, as well as helping manage floods and improving water quality.
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For many years, prospective builders have also had to get a federal permit on top of the state one, which many considered a hassle. Ryan said the Department of State Lands is waiting to hear from the Oregon offices of the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers about how exactly the federal permitting process will change and how that could affect the environmental review.
Since the late 1700s, Oregon has gone from having 2.3 million acres of wetland to around 1.4 million acres, according to the website of the Department of State Lands. During that same time period, the lower 48 states as a whole lost 53% of their precolonial wetlands. That’s 60 acres every hour from 1780 to 1980, according to a research paper posted on the website of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
In recent years, Oregon and other states have sought to slow and reverse these trends.
“As the importance of wetlands, and the ecological significance of those and other natural resources and environmental functions that they performed were recognized, wetlands were added on, basically, to the federal Clean Water Act protections and also to Oregon’s Removal Fill Law,” Ryan said.