Developer along Highway 100 in Marion knows all about wetlands

MARION - One guy who needed a bank is longtime metro-area developer Terry Bjornsen.

A wetland mitigation bank, that is.

Years ago, Bjornsen bought up some 600 acres of undeveloped land in what today is the Highway 100 corridor east of First Avenue East on Marion's far south side.

Back in 2001, he had proposed to build a $39 million convention center and water park replete a wilderness-themed hotel, wildlife museum and golf course on 100 acres of the stretch of Highway 100 that Marion came to call the Marion bypass.

The ambitious development, called Whitetail Lodge Resort and Spa, stalled in a dispute with the city over tax incentives for the project, and it fell by the way.

A decade ago, a Menard's store and other commercial development went in on the north side of Highway 100. But Bjornsen has done nothing but raise row crops on the land across the highway, which, nonetheless, has a paved entrance into it to suggest commercial development one day may come calling.

That day may be here.

For a big part of the summer, heavy equipment was working the 40-acre parcel, grading it in seeming anticipation for something to come.

In recent days, Bjornsen, now 78, said he has been talking to Marion city officials about development plans for the site. More specifically, he said he is seeking to build a mixed-used development that could include a hotel or hotels such as a Hampton Inn and/or a Homewood Suites along with, perhaps, a drugstore, restaurants, commercial/office buildings and apartments and condominiums.

The surest hint of the likelihood of development nearly 15 years after the Whitetail Lodge project came to naught is the trouble and expense that Bjornsen now has gone through to meet federal Clean Water Act requirements as a prelude to building on the site.

This summer, Bjornsen's contractors relocated a stream channel that had cut through the middle of the site to the north edge of it, resulting in the loss of 1.36 acres of wetland, according to a permit required for the work by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The stream relocation work has mandated that Bjornsen purchase 2.07 acres of wetland mitigation credits from one of two wetland mitigation banks in Eastern Iowa at a cost close to $100,000, he said.

According to Corps documents, the credits were purchased from the Brophy Creek Wetland Mitigation Bank in Clinton County, which is owned and is being developed by family-owned Thien Farm Management in Council Bluffs.

Dan Hayes, the regulatory program manager in Iowa for the Corps's Rock Island District office, said the Thien family has been a 'pioneer” in Iowa in the creation of new wetlands to be used as a wetland mitigation bank. Wetland banks sell wetland credits to recoup their investment and make a profit as companies and local and state governments are required to mitigate or replace wetlands they have disturbed by development.

The wetland bank setup directs those in need of credits first to look to buy credits from a bank closest to the development in its ecological drainage unit. As a result, Bjornsen has purchased credits at the Clinton County wetland bank, not at the wetland bank just outside Hills in Johnson County owned and operated by River Products Co. of Iowa City.

Thiens Farm Management owns three of the six wetland mitigation banks now operating in the state, runs a fourth and had owned two of the three others that now have sold all of their wetland credits and have closed.

Adam Thien, company vice president, said one of the company's closed banks sits east of Tama, along Highway 30, and now has been transferred to the Tama County Conservation Board.

The Clinton County bank where Bjornsen has purchased two acres of credit sits along Brophy Creek on what had been poorly performing farm land, Thien said.

He said his farm management company can search up to two years to identify a site where it is worth the risk to invest in the creation of wetland for a wetland bank.

'Everybody has a different definition of a gold mine,” Thien said. 'This is an opportunity to take poorer-quality, less income-producing land and turn it into a profit center.

'You have to look at the risk and the monetary benefit of selling wetland credits over and above what the land would generate as crop land. If the wetland fails, we are on the hook to recreate it. So there's a lot of risk.”

Bjornsen said the purchase of the credits is only part of the expense of preparing his 40-acre site across from the Menard's store on Highway 100 for development.

In addition, he has to do mitigation work on site, which has included building a half-mile-long replacement channel, establishing native grass buffers and adding other habitat structures.

Loren Hoffman, a landscape architect at Hall & Hall Engineers Inc. who is working on the Bjornsen project, said the mitigation work on the Bjornsen development site has been a 'rigorous and lengthy process” with the Corps of Engineers. It's much more work than what would have been required 15 years ago, he said.

As a site designer, Hoffman said his preference to mitigate the impact to wetlands is for the property owner to buy credits off-site from a wetland bank rather than trying to build a new wetland on site. Buying credits prevents ongoing monitoring and reporting to the Corps, he said.

Even so, the Bjornsen project calls for some mitigation on site, too, and Hoffman said one challenge is to keep out reed canary grass, considered an invasive species that can overwhelm native grasses that the site is required to plant.

In Bjornsen's documents submitted to the Corps, he shows a site development plan with 13 buildings on it - though Bjornsen said the plan is a concept for now. Still, he said he has been meeting with City Manager Lon Pluckhahn, and Pluckhahn said as much.

'We've been working on different plans,” Bjornsen said.

Bjornsen chuckled a bit at the environmental work and expense he has had to take on, which he said essentially amounted to moving two 'ditches” that in recent years have come under Corps review because the ditch water flows into Indian Creek and then the Cedar River.

'The Corps now has this jurisdiction, and we're caught under it,” he said.

Mitigation bank operator Thien said what wetland has been lost at the Marion site is being restored at the bank site along Brophy Creek in Clinton County.

Geese, pheasants, frogs and more will benefit, he said.

'I kind of view the wetland bank as private investment driven by public rules and regulations,” Thien said. 'We're providing an option for people to do development and to stay in compliance while developing high-quality wetlands.”