After the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday it is redefining the scope of the nation’s bedrock clean water law to limit the wetlands it protects from pollution and destruction, environmental groups are urging Illinois legislators to establish safeguards. The state has already lost 90% of its original wetlands to urban development and agriculture.
The Trump administration’s action builds on a 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Sackett v. EPA that sharply limited the U.S. government’s authority to regulate water pollution in certain wetlands, effectively stripping 72% of remaining wetlands in Illinois — more than 700,000 acres — of federal protections and leaving them vulnerable to “catastrophic” loss, according to a September analysis by University of Illinois researchers.
“We have to fight like hell for what remains,” said Lindsay Keeney, chief program officer at the Illinois Environmental Council.
Illinois has no state-level protections for these ecosystems beyond some localized county-level protections, mostly in the Chicago area.
“This is even more reason for us to pass something at the state level. I think that we were dependent entirely on federal protections,” said David McEllis, Illinois legislative director at the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center. “This new rule has even more new exclusions, and we need to think about how the state can step up and step in where the federal government is stepping back.”
Advocacy groups in the state — including the Illinois Environmental Council, Environment Illinois and Prairie Rivers Network — are renewing calls for Gov. JB Pritzker to support a comprehensive statewide wetlands protection program. Just last month, a coalition of environmental and community groups sent a petition to the governor’s office with more than 6,500 signatures from Illinoisans demanding the same.
According to Prairie Rivers Network, “The rule claims ‘clarity,’ but achieves it by excluding waters that science — and common sense — tell us are vital to the health of entire watersheds.”
“Democrat Administrations have weaponized the definition of navigable waters to seize more power from American farmers, landowners, entrepreneurs, and families,” Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a news release Monday.
Efforts to implement a statewide wetlands protection program have gained a foothold at the state level; Illinois state Sen. Laura Ellman, a Naperville Democrat, and Rep. Anna Moeller, an Elgin Democrat, have introduced companion bills to the General Assembly that would establish a permitting program.
“I think that (Pritzker’s) leadership here — in signaling to the state legislature and very importantly, to the Department of Natural Resources, which would oversee the program — his leadership, his green lighting, would go a long way to getting that bill done,” said Robert Hirschfeld, director of water policy at Prairie Rivers Network.
If passed, the Wetlands Protection Act would empower the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to regulate private land use around the state’s remaining wetlands. Going into the next legislative session, Ellman hopes the Monday news will encourage other lawmakers to push the bill through, especially for the sake of communities prone to flooding.
“As those (federal) protections disappear, and (wetlands) are paved over or filled in or developed, those relief valves for communities on flood control will start to disappear,” Ellman told the Tribune. “So I’m hoping that I can help make that clear to my fellow legislators and get their support.”
“I think it’s also important to point out that even Justice (Brett) Kavanaugh didn’t agree with the Sackett decision,” McEllis said, referring to one of three Trump appointees on the country’s highest court. “He’s not necessarily a defender of the environment, but even he thought that this went too far.”
Environmentalists and scientists say wetlands are rarely truly “isolated” from a watershed, no matter how inland they may appear to be. According to Prairie Rivers Network, for instance, the standard established in Sackett v. EPA “excludes countless wetlands that are hydrologically connected below the surface, through seasonal flows, or through wetland complexes that function as a unit — even though science shows they are essential to water quality and flood control.”
While state and taxpayer money normally covers the costs of floods, comprehensive legislation in Illinois would require developers to pay for protecting wetlands. A statewide permitting program, Ellman said, would not be taxpayer-funded but rather self-funded as applicants pay associated fees.
“The budget conversation is, really, how the seed money to create the (program),” she said. “Once that’s set up, it really should be self-funded.”
According to U. of I., unprotected wetlands in Illinois provide an estimated $419 million in residential flood control benefits.
McEllis said budget concerns have come up, but for the most part, the state’s Department of Natural Resources has had difficulty determining the scope of needed protections for such a program.
“Unfortunately, now we know that that scope is going to be larger, and (the IDNR is) going to need to figure out potentially what wetlands are in play,” McEllis said.
According to the EPA, the new proposed rule “recognizes that states and tribes know their local land and water resources best” and would strengthen their decision-making authority, “at last (fulfilling) that commitment to real, shared federal and state responsibility.”
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