On May 17, Sussex County Council passed an ordinance intended to better protect wetlands and waterways by enhancing buffers between them and new subdivisions.
The result is both a clear step forward and clear step backward for protections at a crucial moment for waterway health. While the council is commended for the gains realized, much more effective buffers are needed to protect and restore the Inland Bays.
The abundant wetlands and waterways of Sussex County define its very nature and are pillars of its coastal economy. Their role in filtering pollution, stopping floods and providing habitat for fish and wildlife led the county to include them prominently in its 2018 comprehensive plan. That is a good thing because, for decades, the county’s wetlands and waters have been seriously damaged. Most of its waterways fail to meet their uses intended under the United States Clean Water Act, and pollution entering its most important waterways is going up. The Nanticoke River and Little Assawoman Bay are actually experiencing increasing loads of the nutrient pollution that fuel algal blooms, rob waters of their oxygen and destroy aquatic habitats.
Development and the associated loss of forestland has long been recognized as an important contributor to this situation. Thankfully, requiring forested buffers along wetlands, streams and bays has been shown to be an important means to protect waterway health.
Since 1988, the county has required 50-foot-wide buffers on tidal wetlands and waters and on large nontidal streams in new subdivisions. Sadly, enforcement of the code has been spotty, resulting in irreparable damage to natural resources. Lawns instead of forests came to be permitted in buffers, and disturbances to existing forested buffers are common. For years, buffers on large streams were sometimes not required at all.
In the past, commitments for better buffers have been made to address this situation but not acted on. One exception was the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s passage of its own buffer regulations for the Inland Bays in 2008. However, these were voided by a lawsuit led by the county in 2011. So when the county set out to improve its buffer requirements in 2019, there were high hopes.
After extensive stakeholder input and a remarkable amount of public outcry for better buffers, the new ordinance includes both steps forward and steps backward to protect wetlands and water resources.
Steps forward include:
Steps backward include:
In contrast to the ordinance’s achievements, the rollbacks on protection present a fundamental challenge to the protection of the county’s water resources. During the roughly three years it took to pass the ordinance, the county received applications for over 84 major new subdivisions. This breathtaking amount of growth is often near waterways and in areas vulnerable to accelerating sea level rise. The costs and consequences of this to private property and public waterways in the coming decades will be extreme.
Simply put, to protect and actually restore the health of the waters of Sussex County, more effective policies are needed now.
We ask the council to begin work on amendments to the ordinance that increase the width of the buffers, require forests in the buffers, remove options to reduce the width of buffers and extend buffer requirements to commercial and mixed-use developments. We encourage more people to express their desires for policies that will clearly protect and restore their waterways.
To read the full statement from the center, click here. For more information on the ordinance, resources and ways to get involved, click here.
