§ 1790 Wetlands Mitigation Bank Credit

• •You must create at least 20 acres of new wetlands or vernal pools.
• •You can request a credit from the department for the new acres and their habitat value.
• •Only the newly created habitat counts; anything that existed before the project gets no credit.

A city developer creates a 30‑acre wetland on a former parking lot and then wants to use that new wetland to balance out a future project that will remove a small wetland elsewhere in the city.

Because the developer made a new wetland that is bigger than 20 acres, they can ask the department to count those 30 acres (and their habitat value) as credit to cover the loss of the other wetland. They can’t count any part of the site that was already wet before they started the project.