Anchorage's wetlands plan describes a permit the city cannot issue

Anchorage's wetlands plan describes a permit the city has not issued in five years.

The 2014 plan was built around a system in which the municipality handled fill permits for its least valuable wetlands, the ones mapped as Class C. That ended April 30, 2021, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declined to renew the three regional permits that allowed it. Since then, anyone filling wetlands goes to the Corps, and still needs a city permit on top of it if the parcel is mapped.

Then the ground shifted again. In 2023 the U.S. Supreme Court held in Sackett v. EPA that the Clean Water Act reaches only wetlands with a continuous surface connection to navigable waters. "This left a huge regulatory gap," the administration wrote in its memo to the Assembly, because the plan had been built around a general permit and Class C wetlands alone. The Ecological Society of America has said the ruling excludes most wetlands from federal protection, leaving states and local governments to decide how much of that to pick up.

An update scheduled for reading before the Assembly on Tuesday would bring the plan into line with how permitting actually works now. It is the first change since the Assembly adopted the plan in July 2014, and it is a stopgap. A comprehensive rewrite is meant to follow, and this version was assembled after the municipality lost its dedicated wetlands coordinator.

The update reassigns oversight to the planning and development services departments, redraws the permit process diagram, and gives the planning director authority to adjust wetland map boundaries administratively when a delineation no more than five years old supports the change.

That authority is narrow by design. It covers boundary lines on individual parcels and nothing else. It cannot change how a wetland is classified, alter policy, or touch regulatory standards.

The Planning and Zoning Commission approved it unanimously in July with no recorded opposition, and the Watershed and Natural Resources Advisory Commission backed it in April.

Two municipal departments wanted more. Parks and Recreation and the Private Development Division asked for clearer definition of who oversees what, and Private Development staff suggested holding the measure until a written agreement spells out each department's role.