When Keith Kimble and his business partners agreed to spend $1 million building a road around their property, they expected to reap the benefits.
The city of Streetsboro, which also contributed funds, would get a connector road between Routes 480 and 43, and their 91 acres of undeveloped land would become more valuable.
"We had to borrow that money," Kimble said. "We obviously hoped to recoup it by developing the piece of property."
But that's not what happened.
The land in Portage County northeast of Akron has sat undeveloped and unsold because it's covered with 3,865 feet of ephemeral streams. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency says these kinds of temporary streams, which appear and disappear with the rain, are protected waterways. Property owners can't just get rid of them. They must dredge new streams or pay to have them built somewhere else in the watershed. And that's not cheap.
Kimble estimated it would cost another $1 million for ephemeral stream mitigation – more than what he and his business partners paid for the property in 2009.
Federal EPA regulations expanded to include ephemeral streams in 2015 before being rescinded in 2020, and Kimble would like to see Ohio follow suit.
Most House Republicans agree with Kimble. All but two of them voted 61-33 to reduce the regulations on ephemeral streams earlier this month.
Supporters of House Bill 175 say Ohio shouldn't be in the business of regulating "puddles." Opponents, like the Ohio EPA, claim these streams are the true headwaters of our rivers, and deregulating them could seriously harm the state's wildlife and drinking water.
Is it a ditch or a stream?
The United States divides its streams into three categories: Perennial (always flowing), intermittent (flows seasonally) and ephemeral (flows from rain or snowmelt).
In Ohio, there are about 115,000 miles of headwater streams and 32% of them fall into the ephemeral category, according to Ohio EPA Director Laurie Stevenson.
They used to be regulated by the federal government, but that changed in June 2020 when then-President Donald Trump's administration cut them from its definition. Thirty-six states followed suit, but Ohio did not.
HB 175 would essentially reverse that. Developers, like Kimble, would be allowed to grade over these streams and use stormwater/watershed rules to manage any runoff from their properties.
"We define an ephemeral stream as one that starts nowhere and goes nowhere," Ohio Home Builders Association Vice President Vincent Squillace said. "It's like an indentation in the ground."
Sure, Richard Cogen, the director of the Ohio River Foundation, said, but those indentations ferry water into our streams that flow in our rivers and lakes and oceans.
Ephemeral streams build up layers of nutrient-rich soil that then get deposited along the riverbanks. They also help prevent flooding, filter contaminants and replenish groundwater.
"We need to understand that a watershed is not made up of just the existing water bodies but of all the land within the watershed ...," Cogen said. "It’s all a cumulative flow, and I think the concept needs to be better understood."
These aren't roadside ditches or other artificially constructed channels.
"Ohio EPA has not, does not, and will not regulate puddles or tire tracks," Stevenson told lawmakers during a committee meeting in May. Ephemeral streams are where Ohio's rivers truly begin.
Richard Warner, a retired biosystems professor from the University of Kentucky, doesn't dispute that definition. Instead, he told lawmakers that Ohio doesn't have a lot of true ephemeral streams left.
When Ohio was the wild west
Back in the "Daniel Boone days," Ohio's streams were managed by beavers.
"Beaver ponds stored stormwater, sediment, and nutrients," Warner said. And they slowly filtered the water as it moved downstream.
But those ponds and even those beavers aren't around anymore.
Ohio's current ephemeral streams come from a "wide spectrum of developmental activities," and they function "more like a pipe" that rushes everything (both the good and the bad) downstream.
He recommended that Ohio use stormwater regulations to mandate the creation of retention ponds as sort of modern-day beaver dams instead of mandating the construction of new ephemeral streams.
But Midwest Biodiversity Institute Director Peter Precario says those stormwater rules aren't so great either.
"What we have seen after doing lots and lots of water evaluations is that those fixes don’t usually work," Precario said. "They don’t replace mother nature."
Water quality declines and some of the tactics proposed by HB 175 "can actually make pollution worse."
Another federal flip flop
Ohio Republicans appear to agree with Warner, which means there might not be much Democrats and environmental groups can do to stop them.
Even opponent testimony from outdoorsman groups like Backcountry Hunters & Anglers didn't seem to persuade them to hit the pause button.
But the Biden Administration could.
There's a new EPA director, and the agency is in the process of rewriting the clean water rules yet again.
"I don’t think anyone has seen what they are going to do," Precario said. "But they will very likely restore a lot of what was proposed."
That might take a couple of years though, which means Ohio could create a window of opportunity for developers like Kimble.
"It’s regulation that isn’t necessary... ," said Nathan Vaughn, an attorney who represents Kimble and his business partners. "The average person wouldn’t appreciate that they can go to jail if they destroy certain water features on their property. It’s just the way the water runs off. There’s no fish, no frogs. Everybody has got those."
The question environmentalists ask, however, is whether we should all pay more attention to those little rain rivers in our backyards.
"If it doesn’t bother you to go in and completely change the water cycle, I guess it’s easy to say everything will be fine," Precario said. "Sometimes you can landscape a place and make it look very pretty but the effect on the biology is devastating."
Anna Staver is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.
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