VANITY:HOA wants to buy "mitigation bank" for community streams. COE/EPA take over.

16 NOV 16 | dcbryan1

[DCBryan1]

I went to our yearly HOA meeting last night. Some consultant with GBM Associates in Bryant, AR said that he is proposing a "Neighborhood mitigation bank" where we buy "credits" for letting the Corps of Engineers (COE) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) get deeded our "wetlands", which are really 2 creeks, and dry tributaries.

The consultant was honest. He said, no federal law dictates it, just a 1983 guidance. NO promises of making money, no guarantees that COE/EPA will do anything. Fines are possibe, like if my kid catches crawfish, or throws rocks in the lake/stream.

Anyways, my wife and I are pretty darn smart, and this is the first I've heard of this. The consultant said, "think of this as carbon credits", to which I replied, "Yeah, all that did was make Al Gore and consultants rich, and planted a few crappy saplings and put it on video. $100,000.00 sent in, and a neighborhood gets $100.00 worth of crappy sapling trees.

[wildbill]

I’ve been on a HOA condominium board for more than 10 years. I’d advise you not to get involved with the government, especially with anything to do with the ownership of part of the property.

The environment clique within the EPA is strong and vicious in their application of rules and regulations they wrote themselves, mostly without much Congressional oversight. Words in a regulation that seem innocent today, they could interpret tomorrow to mean something ridiculous. And how do you fight them as a small HOA? You can’t. You don’t have the money for that sort of contingency.

What could they do? Since they would own the rights to the creek, what would happen if they said the runoff from the higher land (your driveways and lawns) into the(ir) wetlands is illegal and you must pay a fine for pollution and also do something to make sure it doesn’t occur. They are probably the most unreasonable agency in the government because they are staffed with radicals and have had an almost unlimited run in making regulations.