Wetlands bill to face lawmakers with $1.5M annual cost

Why Should Delaware Care?
As the Trump administration rolls back environmental regulations, environmentalists have worried about the tens of thousands of acres of wetlands that could be left unprotected. For the first time in decades, a state-level wetlands bill is seeming to garner bipartisan support.

For the first time in decades, a proposed law to govern freshwater wetlands is receiving unrivaled support from environmentalists, farmers and developers alike.

“Mike Riemann and I literally wrote the same sentence in our remarks,” Emily Knearl with the Nature Conservancy in Delaware testified last month in Legislative Hall, referring to sharing sentiments with the immediate past president of the Home Builders Association of Delaware. 

“Is this bill perfect? No. But it’s good enough,” she said.

How Senate Bill 9, known as the Wetland Stewardship Act, fares once it faces the full Senate and House with its annual $1.5 million-plus price tag remains to be seen. There was no fiscal note when the bill made it unanimously through the Senate Environment, Energy & Transportation Committee in mid-April.

“Everyone feels the pain of something, but they also see the uncertainty of doing nothing,” State Sen. Stephanie Hansen (D-Middletown) recently told Spotlight Delaware. 

She said she believed that meeting with so many stakeholders for so long made the key difference in getting so much compromise and support so far. A previous version of the bill failed in committee in 2024.

Knearl agreed that getting dozens of diverse people involved in developing the legislation created a transparent process in which everyone was able to mostly agree that not all wetlands are created equally.

“I’ve been doing this work for 30 years and this is hands-down the best process I have ever seen in terms of writing a complex piece of legislation,” Knearl told Spotlight Delaware. “And this is just the first step.”

What does the bill do?

Unlike the previous version of a freshwater wetlands bill that Hansen tried last session, this legislation protects additional ecosystems by expanding the state’s existing wetlands program instead of adding a new program altogether.

A big concern from more conservative voices at the table, such as farmers and developers, has been giving state environmental regulators too much say in what land can be developed.

Currently, the state has a tidal wetlands program overseeing development on and around tidal waterways and connected ecosystems. State-level protections extend to nontidal wetlands that are only 400 contiguous acres or larger, such as the Great Cypress Swamp along the state’s southern border. 

County and municipal governments may have additional requirements for buffers along waterways, but the urgency this year stems from a complete rollback of wetlands protections at the federal level.

The Wetlands Stewardship Act will update and extend the new permitting process for landowners to also include nontidal or freshwater wetlands that can be as small as half an acre. It also calls for the development of a wetland “screening tool” to be developed as part of the initial regulations.

The actual rules governing this program expansion, which will also add a new category of “exceptional value wetlands,” are yet to be developed. That would be up to a regulatory advisory committee created by the bill.

Riemann, a civil engineer and a principal of Becker Morgan Group, said that committee will be modeled after another that developed the state’s modern stormwater and sediment regulations.

He also agreed that there was “a lot of give and take” throughout what he described as a years-long process to address not only wetlands protection, but also permitting problems and challenges with sprawl.

“Sometimes there’s a belief that you’re either for regulation or you’re not for regulation,” Riemann said. “You can have responsible regulations and you can have appropriate environmental protections, but you can do it efficiently, and you can do it clearly.”

What makes it a million-dollar program?

A fiscal note recently added to the bill indicates that the expansion of the existing wetlands program within the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control will require at least a dozen additional full-time employees.

In the program’s first year, DNREC anticipates nearly $1 million in general start-up costs that will include hiring 12 new full-time staff, including environmental specialists, environmental scientists and one “enforcement coordinator.” Another $765,419 in recurring costs bring the first-year total to $1.73 million.

The program’s cost is expected to be offset by nearly $250,000 in anticipated annual revenue from permit fees. 

Projections for the cost are slightly lower in the program’s second and third year, even including a 2% inflation cost increase. By Fiscal Year 2029, the expanded wetlands program would cost an additional $1.66 million per year. 

While a significant sum, it’s a small slice of the state’s proposed $6.9 billion operating budget.

What happens next?

Now that the bill is out of committee, it will head to the Senate floor for consideration. No date has been set for it to be considered.

If it is approved in the Senate, it will then head to the House for a final vote. If it clears that hurdle, it will head to Gov. Matt Meyer’s desk. If he signs the bill, then the process of actually developing the new regulations can begin.