What goes into the process of making a mitigation bank?
A bank sponsor proposes to establish and operate a mitigation bank. The regulatory agencies form a mitigation bank review team and, along with the bank sponsor, try to develop, through consensus, an appropriate Mitigation Banking Instrument (MBI) that describes how credits are composed of wetlands creation, restoration, enhancement and/or preservation on a particular site or geographic area. When a permittee proposes to impact wetlands under Section 404 in the service area of the mitigation bank, the authorizing agency may determine that further avoidance, minimization or project-specific mitigation, or in-lieu-fee arrangements are not ecologically desirable or are not practicable and may then allow the mitigation bank to be debited an amount representing the loss of aquatic functions at the impact site if sufficient credits are available at the mitigation bank, under the terms of its MBI. The permittee must financially compensate the bank sponsor in exchange for allowing its bank to b
