Recently, Kendall County officials noticed a development coming through the county planning process that needed to compensate for the wetlands it would be taking up.
So, the developers purchased wetlands credits from the Forest Preserve District – the DeKalb County Forest Preserve District, that is – for $40,000 an acre.
“The first I heard of this was at the (Planning, Building and Zoning Committee,)” said Kendall County Board member Scott Gryder, who chairs that committee. “It baffled me why the credits would go through DeKalb.”
The reason is that Kendall County does not have what is known as a land-banking program, which must be approved and monitored by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Land-banking is a situation where developers or road contractors can purchase credits that allow them to build on a wetlands area. The credits are backed by wetlands somewhere else, considered compensation for the wetlands being eliminated.
The wetland land-banking areas can be created by forest preserve districts, park districts or even cities. The city of Geneva, for instance, created a large land-banking wetlands area on its far western edge several years ago. Most of the forest preserve districts in the Chicago area have wetlands banking programs.
“It seems like a lot of our surrounding forest preserves have programs in place,” Gryder said.
David Guritz, Kendall’s Forest Preserve director, said this week at the Forest Preserve Commission meeting that land-banking certainly is something Kendall County can look into doing. The county would have to reach out to the Army Corps to see what land it might have that could be made eligible for credits.
“It has to meet Army Corps requirements,” Guritz said. “They decide what can be in it and what can’t be.”
Forest Preserve President Jeff Wehrli said credits can be used for private developments or public road projects. He said there are a lot of “avenues and possibilities” with such a program.
Guritz said there are several ways the county could create land-banking credits. In one scenario, the county could use a current field, break up the field tiles in it and flood the property, then create a wetland. A more likely scenario is finding existing wetlands that have “somewhat degraded,” such as in Henneberry Woods, and restore them, Guritz said.
“Henneberry is an existing situation where we could bring it back to where it was,” he said. “It would be interesting for us to explore.”
