by Brian McKenna

If you head over to the Groesbeck golf course, off Grand River Avenue in Lansing, keep your eyes peeled for one of the human-made wonders of Mid-Michigan, the Tollgate Wetlands. In the early 1990s Pat Lindemann and his staff at the Ingham county Drain Office completed work on this wetland ecosystem designed to naturally clean and recharge the neighborhood’s storm water. It’s a unique solution to the problem of cleaning water pollution that is both environmentally conscious and cost effective. It’s also a great place to take a walk or enjoy the wildlife, as many Groesbeck residents do.

When it rains, the Tollgate wetlands spring into operation, capturing -- through an intricate web of storm sewers and lilly-laden holding ponds -- a good portion of the non-point source pollution of the Groesbeck neighborhood. This includes fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide runoff from lawn care, oil drippings from cars, pet waste, and road salt. Citizens are advised to reduce or remove their use of all these pollutants around their homes, but for those who ignore the warnings, the ecologically sustainable ecosystem is there to exact its, uh, toll.

The wetland needs regular maintenance since wetlands cannot remove oil, salt, or herbicides meant to kill plants.

Various native plants were landscaped into the area. And all have a special role to play in protecting water quality or quantity. For example an acre of broad-leafed arrowhead (or "duck potato") evapotranspirates thousands of gallons of water into the air in a single day. Native wildflowers like Cat-tail sedge have been planted to provide wildlife habitat and absorb water runoff. The wetland water is also used to irrigate the Groesbeck golf course, having been brought to within water quality standards after filtering.

The news is not as fortunate for the rest of Ingham County. In October 1980 the State of Michigan enacted a landmark wetland statute that changed the rules for developers. Certain wetlands were regulated, including all those that were connected to a permanent inland lake system. For counties with a population greater than 100,000 (like Ingham County) all isolated wetlands greater than five acres in size were also regulated. Everything smaller than five acres was unregulated, meaning that people could do whatever they wanted with them.

Regulation did not mean protection, however. Developers -- of a housing project, industrial park, a road etc. -- and homeowners could apply for a permit to develop property. If they were granted permission to destroy a wetland, they were required to replace it by building another wetland in another place. They had to build a bigger wetland, at a ratio of 1.5 new wetland acres to one old wetland acre.
How has the program gone? Not very well. Unfortunately, the wetland mitigation rule has been poorly enforced. First of all, for most of the program’s history, the state Department of Environmental Quality never kept records of the permitted sites. Moreover, department representatives rarely, if ever follow up with a developer to check whether they had actually created a new wetland as they were required to do by law.

In the past three years, the department has placed more effort into getting its house in order, and record keeping has improved. As of June 1999, the department only had records of 23 permitted acres lost to 35.5 mitigated acres (replaced) for Ingham County. But the department does not know whether those 35.5 acres (listed on paper) were indeed replaced, in reality. According to Rob Zbciak, a state surface water quality specialist, wetland mitigation did not begin in earnest until the mid-1980s, and even then, many people didn’t know about it. Even today the wetland overseers have "a limited staff stretched too thin."

Zbciak said that the number of 23 wetland acres lost to development was "probably low." He said that a better indicator of sprawl was wetland lost illegally; however he admitted that this number is hard to ascertain.

I like to take a walk in a patch of wetland that still survives in East Lansing, Harrison Meadows. The city paved a trail through its thick innards a few years back, attracting a trickle of hikers, bikers and rollerbladers. A great swath of green hedges, lazy logs and preening grass laced by a winding stream full of croaking bullfrogs. The huge blue sphere above dwarfs me. The meadow is my portal into Montana where I escape the day’s pressures as I crack off four miles of perambulation.
Not a park, nor a mall, a gridiron or a lot. Just one last stand of nature, forever altered by man, but humming with whispers of the eternal. A retreat against the sprawlers.