Looking to Local Law: Can Local Ordinances Help Protect Isolated Wetlands?

If federal regulatory agencies say that Clean Water Act protection no longer extends to certain isolated wetlands, and state legislatures delay in passing laws to “fill the gap, ” perhaps environmental advocates need to fight for wetland protections on new fronts, such as city halls, county municipal buildings, and township offices. BY KIM DIANA CONNOLLY or more than three decades, wetland regulation has been viewed primarily as the province of the federal government. Although no single, comprehensive federal law exists to protect wetlands, the 1972 passage of what has come to be known as the Clean Water Act has yielded a complex federal regulatory web governing many activities in wetlands.1 Yet since key strands in this web were stretched or broken as a result of the 2001 U.S. Suprem