WASHINGTON — Despite complaints from landowners about delays and difficulty in obtaining government permission to destroy wetlands, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation says it's easy to get approval - too easy.
Government agencies turned down less than 10 percent of applicants who asked for permits to fill or drain wetlands in the bay region from 1991 to 1993, said a report by the foundation, the region's largest environmental group. More than three-quarters of the permits were granted in seven months or less.
The result, the foundation said, is that the region is losing thousands of acres of wetlands each year, despite a 1988 promise by bay jurisdiction officials to allow no net loss and to seek a gain in acreage.
''Wetland losses are at a crisis stage,'' William C. Baker, the foundation's president, said at a news conference (Tuesday) at a seafood market in the District of Columbia. ''If we want to save the bay, we have to save wetlands.''
Salt marshes, swamps and other wetlands, once scorned, now are valued because they provide flood control, filter pollution and are habitat for fish, birds and animals. Forty-three percent of endangered species nationwide depend on wetlands, and Bay Foundation officials said the region's seafood industry does too.
By the 1980s, Maryland had lost 73 percent of its wetlands acreage since colonial days, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report. Virginia had lost 42 percent. The District was not counted in the report.
An unpublished update of that report concludes that from 1982 to 1989, the six-state bay drainage area from New York to Virginia lost 37,000 more acres, an area equivalent to that of the District.
When wetlands gains were taken into account - from manmade wetlands or natural occurrences - the net loss dropped to just less than 20,000 acres.
Most of that - nearly 18,000 acres - was in Virginia, according to the report, based on aerial photographs. Maryland's net loss was pegged at 4,900 acres.
Wetlands are destroyed for a variety of reasons, the foundation report said. Some are filled illegally, undetected by understaffed enforcement programs.
Most, though, are drained or bulldozed legally - a few acres at a time with government permission, for reasons from putting up a building to protecting a shoreline with boulders. In other cases, activities such as farming and forestry are exempt from regulation, the bay group said.
The group's report, based on a study of 800 permit applications, said permits are granted more quickly in Virginia than Maryland, and with fewer conditions attached.
Different aspects of wetlands permit programs are run by the two states and the Army Corps of Engineers.
Bay foundation officials recommended closing loopholes, improving enforcement and monitoring, adding staff members to wetlands programs, and seeking more alternatives to wetlands destruction. Although creating new wetlands is environmentally risky, the bay group said officials should require it whenever wetlands are destroyed.
The foundation urged bay jurisdiction officials to seek to add 100,000 acres of new wetlands in the region by 2010.