Anchorage moves to clarify its wetlands permitting, though some say it doesn't go far enough

The Anchorage Assembly takes up an ordinance next week meant to make it clearer for property owners with mapped wetlands to navigate permitting — though some city staff say it still leaves gaps in who's actually in charge.

The change would assign oversight of the city's roughly 14,559 acres of freshwater wetlands to the Development Services Director, shared with the Planning Department, and require the city to keep a public, up-to-date flowchart of the permitting process. There are named staff to field questions, but the dedicated wetlands coordinator position, cut in an earlier reorganization, would stay unfilled — which is the crux of the criticism. The ordinance would also let the Planning Director redraw wetland boundaries administratively, without an Assembly hearing, when a recent delineation differs from the official map.

The update is a response to two outside changes. In 2021, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stopped renewing the blanket permits that had covered routine wetlands fill in Anchorage, so every such project now needs individual Corps authorization. And the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. EPA narrowed which wetlands the Clean Water Act covers — a shift the city's own maps haven't yet caught up to.

That gap gave the city's Planning and Zoning Commission pause. Members and some development staff worried that without someone clearly running point, the new structure could create fresh confusion, and one commissioner tried to postpone the case. But planners urged the commission to act, arguing that delay would only prolong the confusion already built into the current system. The commission ultimately recommended approval, and next week's reading is the first chance for the public to weigh in. A larger second phase of the update is still to come.