Bank Business Booming But Questions Remain

Estuarine lands near the coastline of Tampa Bay aren’t the only habitats that could benefit from conservation and restoration. Housing developments, strip malls, even road construction, have the potential to destroy the area’s vital wetlands.

While project developers are required to avoid or minimize the impact on wetlands, sometimes it can’t be helped. In that case, they’re required to mitigate the damage that’s been done by creating new wetlands to replace the ones that have been lost, often at a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio, so two or three new acres of wetland are created for each one that’s destroyed.

But sometimes there’s no room to create new wetlands on the same piece of property — or even in proximity — to where they’ve been destroyed. So the Tampa Bay area’s first mitigation bank is offering wetlands mitigation credits for sale to meet federal, state and local environmental permitting needs.

With a mitigation bank, a big tract of wetlands can be restored, rather than using a piecemeal approach where one-quarter of an acre is restored at one location, and a half acre is restored several miles away.

“Mitigation banks may be one way we can maybe improve the quality of wetlands,” says Lindsay Cross, environmental scientist at the Tampa Bay Estuary Program (TBEP).

The Tampa Bay Mitigation Bank is the first approved for the area and is operated by Birkitt Environmental Services Inc. on 161 acres in the vicinity of Cockroach Bay.

“It provides all the benefits in one area. It’s better than little postage-stamp size mitigation areas,” says Beverly Birkitt, the bank’s managing member.

Already, estuarine and mangrove habitats have been created on the land, and freshwater areas are in the works in an area that had once been farmer’s fields and ditches, Birkitt says. By re-creating those habitats, the area has become a favorite foraging area for white ibises, and was a big hit with waterfowl in the spring.

The bank had more than 100 credits for sale, and already “a number” have been snapped up, particularly to offset public construction and utility projects, such as natural gas lines and roads. The bank serves portions of Hillsborough, Pinellas, Manatee and Pasco counties.

The economic downturn has had an impact, and credit sales have slowed this year, but it’s a good bet Tampa Bay area development will eventually come roaring back and “someone will need it in the future,” Birkitt says.
Plans for several other mitigation banks are in the works.

But one drawback to mitigation banks might be their locations. A wetland destroyed in Clearwater might be replaced by one at a mitigation bank 30 miles away. “By creating and mitigating with high-quality wetlands in Hillsborough County, you’re left with a loss on the other side of Tampa Bay,” Cross says.

To address this and other issues, the Tampa Bay Estuary Program is working with various local, state and federal partners on an EPA-funded project to examine how mitigation of freshwater wetlands can occur in a more meaningful and ecologically beneficial way within the Tampa Bay watershed.