Trump's Wetland Dispute Slogs On at Bedminster Course

talking about golf courses. Did you know that it's actually kind of hard for golf courses to abide by all the environmental regulations that are out there. You know what makes it even harder, though, when your golf course is owned by the President of the United States of America. Hello, and welcome back once again to Parts Pervillion, the environmental podcast from Bloomberg Law. I'm your host, David Schultz. So you've probably heard that Donald Trump owns a golf course

in New Jersey. It's called the Trump National Bedminster, and it's just outside of New York City. You may not have heard, however, that this golf course has spent the last decade or so trying to resolve an environmental dispute with the state of New Jersey. Now, before you get your torches and pitchforks out, it should be said that these are some relatively minor issues as far as environmental law violations go. They basically concerned some damage to sensitive

wetlands on and around the course. But when an environmental violation happens at a business owned by the president, nothing is ever simple. Bloomberg Glass Steven Lee wrote about this dispute between New Jersey environmental officials and the Trump national and he says the whole matter illustrates why when policymakers own businesses, things can get messy really fast. But first Stephen explained exactly what a wetland is and why damaging

one is not good for the environment. Wetlands are areas where you have water covering the soil, or water just beneath the surface of the soil. So it's that marshy, swampy land that you see in Florida like the Everglades, and up along the East Coast through New England, that's

all wetlands. Most of the East Coast actually qualifies as a wetland environment according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, So why are they important because they are super productive ecosystems that provide habitats for all kinds of birds, fish, mammals, reptiles, insects, and plants. Of course, the EPA calls them biological supermarkets because they provide a lot of food for animal species. They also store a lot of carbon, which can help

mitigate climate change. And then they act as kind of sponges to soak up surface water or storm surges and rain, so that can be important to minimize flooding. And on top of that, they can act as a kind of a filter for pollution. Their wetlands are tightly regulated by the EPA and the States because they recognize how important they are. And historically the basic ideas has been no net loss, meaning we want to preserve and even expand

the nation's wetlands. But that has been unwound under the Trump administration, which has lifted federal protections for I think about half the nation's wetlands. Well, that's a great explanation of why they're important, and I think this is just one of many things that I feel like people have done a one to eighty on, you know, in the sort of forties and fifties and maybe sixties. You know, the idea I think when you encountered a swamp was this is bad. You know, it's full of disease and bugs.

Let's get rid of it. Let's drain in and build something on it. And now I think after the environmental movement started, we just have a completely opposite viewpoint. And I think people realized that, as you mentioned, wetlands are really important from an environmental standpoint. I think that's right.

And you know, it's also because so much of particularly the East Coast and also down through the South, is a wetland environment because there's also you know, that's where there's been so much building in the last you know, however, many decades. There's always this tension between preserving wetlands and also developing, and I think that's what we are sort of seeing that in the Bedminster case. Well, let's get

right into it. So, you know, we're talking about the President's golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, which is on the outskirts of the you know, New York City metropolitan area. Sounds like, based on your story, I gathered that around ten years ago or so, there were some wetland violations happening at this golf course. Can you tell me a

little bit about what was going on there? Well, So Donald Trump bought the land in two thousand and two and he started building the Bedminster Golf Club, which is one of the crown jewels of his business empire. It's something that the President is extremely proud of. It's actually

where he said he wants to be buried well. And also, I mean we should point out not just that, but this is also a significant in that this is the place where he held a fundraiser I think the day before it was announced that he had coronavirus, right, that's right. I think it was October first, And yeah, so there's a lot of outrage about, you know, him holding that event when he was presumably contagious. But that's not what

we're talking about today. We're talking about wetlands. Mm hmm. Yeah. So, so shortly after construction started at Bedminster, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection started hitting the golf course with a range of violations of their permits, all having to do with water. There were, you know, unauthorized disturbances with freshwater wetlands and wetland transition areas and state open waters

and there was kind of small amounts of water. And the two sides have been working together over the years to resolve these violations, and they have apparently all been settled except for one. Well, and this is what I

wanted to get into. And what I thought was really interesting about your story is that it illustrates something that I've noticed in environmental enforcement all the time, which is that you know, when a company or an individual violates an environmental regulation, they're not necessarily required to like undo the damage they've done. Sometimes they can, I guess, atone for that by restoring the ecology elsewhere. It sounds like

that's what's going on at Bedminster, right. I think that's right, and you're right, these kinds of arrangements are fairly common. Sometimes a regulator will tell you to mitigate something because

you literally cannot fix what you've done. So, for example, if you've built a lot of big buildings or other infrastructure and then the regulator comes in and says you shouldn't have done that, or there's some kind of environmental problem with the footprint of what you've built, it is not always practical to tear all that down and try to fix it. So you can sometimes gopreciate with the regulator to compensate for the damage by fixing something else,

and that's what happened in this case. Bedminster and New Jersey had agreed that the golf course would essentially compensate for unavoidable environmental damage by creating thirty one thousand square feet of wetlands on the golf course in sort of a different area. And last November, Bedminster laid out a proposal to do that, and New Jersey responded this year by saying that essentially their plan is not good enough

and has to be changed. That actually happened two weeks before the Trump administration issued its new rule that rolls back protections for many wetlands. We're going to take a quick break now, but don't go anywhere because when we come back, we'll hear more about this case. Stay tuned. Okay, this is really complicated, and this is this is why I really love this story because there's so many factors at play here. You have the President's golf course with

some wetland violations. The state of New Jersey, which we should note is you know, the governor of the state of New Jersey is not of the President's party. The state of New Jersey is issuing them some violation notices for what went down at the golf course. The golf course is trying to deal with this. But then at the same time, the President himself, acting as the president, is changing the rules around protections of the wetlands that would affect his own golf course potentially. I mean, am

I do I have that right? I'm not even sure if I fully comprehend what's going on here. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, we don't know, you know, what the linkages are. So in other words, it did President Trump issue his or direct his EPA to you know, change the rules on wetlands because of the problems that he was having at Minister. Probably not. But nevertheless, the facts that you've laid out are accurate. Now, okay, and we should say you talked to the Bedminster golf course here.

You reached out to them, right, and did they respond? No, they never got back to me. We reached out to the White House also and to the Trump organization, and

they never responded. So the other thing that I really liked about your story is that you also talk to other people who are familiar with managing golf courses and dealing with environmental issues on golf courses, and it sounded like they said that the Trump Golf Club here is dealing with these environmental issues in a pretty standard way. That this is you know, they're actually, you know, not

trying to get around any of these state issues. And and I think one person mentioned that if they were, the state of New Jersey would be on top of

them really quickly, you know. Yeah. I talked to a group called the National Golf Course Owners Association and a couple of you know, pretty veteran golf course architects, and what they say is that when you are building a golf course, you're essentially in the land stewardship business, and it's very common, according to them, for a regulator to come in and take issue with the way you've done it.

Bedminster is a very large golf course. It's about four times bigger than the average golf course in the US, and of course, it is located in a wetland area, and some golf course people have said that, you know, it can be hard to determine the boundaries of designated permitted areas, especially before you've cleared the land in some cases, they say it's pretty subjective and there can be good

faith disagreements about where the boundaries should be drawn. It should be noted I think that Bedminster is actually a member of the National golf Course Owners Association. These were the people who are saying that these kinds of violations are fairly standard. But nevertheless, we do know that not every violation a business commits is a wilful one, and

sometimes things just happen, Yeah, for sure. So overall, it sounds like, even though the state recently rejected the golf course's plan to mitigate the environmental damage it caused, it sounds like the negotiations between the golf course and the state of New Jersey are growing relatively smoothly. I mean, it doesn't sound like there's any you know, real major conflict there. Despite that, though, it sounds like the President himself has weighed in on this to some extent. What

did he say, Well, he hasn't. I'm not aware that he has spoken specifically about Bedminster, but you know, he has said many times that there's too much red tape in this country and it's made it too hard to get anything built. He gave a speech in Atlanta in July, in which he said, and here I'll quote him, I was in business for a long time, and I had to go through a process that was so ridiculous. It was so ridiculous. We went through a process for building buildings.

Usually it would take forever. By the time you'd start building, the market changed. You said, you know, the market was good when we started. Now the market is lousy, so you'd say, the hell with it, we won't build. So that's a pretty standard conservative argument for deregulation. Again, we don't know that the violations at Bedminster directly fed into the presidence thinking on environmental rules or water rules. I think it's likely that he's not even aware of this.

But what we do know, because he's said it many times, is that he has had these kinds of experiences in the past with regulators. He has battled regulators many times with his real estate properties and his casinos and Trump University and other businesses. So I would say that for Trump to have problems at his golf course is the kind of thing that he's experienced many times in the past. And of course, any president's personal experience is going to

feed into his or her governing philosophy. Well, thank you, Steven. I think I will say I think your Trump impression could use a little bit of work. I don't think you're going to be cast on Saturday Night Live anytime soon, but thank you. We appreciate you coming on. Thanks David. That's it for today's episode of Parts per Billion. If you want more environmental news, check us out on Twitter. We use a pretty easy to remember handle. It's at environment.

Just that at Environment, I'm at David B. Schultz if you want to yell directly at me about anything. Today's episode of partsper Billion was produced by myself and Josh Block. Parts Pavilion was created by Jessic Coombs and Rachel Dagel. The music for today's episode is a Message by Jazarre and Feel That Beat by Tom Hillock and Nicholas Boskovic. They were used under a Creative Commons license. Thank you everyone for listening. Those nine justices in Washington think could

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