Pictured is a bed of weeds in Chautauqua Lake’s Burtis Bay in late August 2022. Submitted photo

Legislation to exempt inland lakes from the state’s Freshwater Wetlands Act has been reintroduced in the state Senate.

Sen. George Borrello, R-Sunset Bay, recently reintroduced his bill (S.3656) in the Senate, while Assemblyman Andrew Molitor, R-Westfield, plans to reintroduce the legislation in the state Assembly in the coming days. The bill was introduced too late in the 2024 state legislative session to gain much traction.

“I have re-introduced legislation in the Assembly that will exempt all navigable lakes from the wetland regulatory scheme; I am committed to striking the necessary balance so that wetland regulations do not adversely affect businesses and residents around our inland lakes,” Molitor said.

The bill would exempt inland lakes that are navigable waterways and have an area of 150 acres or more from freshwater wetlands designations. The bill will further exclude the Great Lakes from the definition of “inland lake.”

“This piece of legislation is necessary to balance environmental protection with economic and recreational interest. This approach allows for targeted conservation efforts by focusing on areas where wetland protections are most needed while also accommodating responsible land and water use,” Borrello and Molitor wrote in their legislative justification.

Early in 2024, Borrello wasn’t sure if the Freshwater Wetlands Act would have much affect on Chautauqua Lake. That changed as the year went on, with Borrello and former Assemblyman Andrew Goodell calling for a delay. Borrello and Goodell also wrote a letter to Sean Mahar, interim DEC commissioner, expressing their concerns with the way proposed wetlands regulations could affect Chautauqua Lake. They specifically asked that the proposed DEC regulations not designate lakes as wetlands because that designation would be inconsistent with both existing statutory language and decades of precedent.

In 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law revisions to New York’s Freshwater Wetlands Act. New York’s original Freshwater Wetlands Act was enacted in 1975 to regulate activities near larger wetlands, greater than 12.4 acres, and smaller wetlands considered to be of unusual local importance. The new wetlands law eliminates the use of the old, inaccurate wetland maps and clarifies that all wetland areas greater than 12.4 acres are subject to Article 24 regulations. Freshwater wetlands are lands and submerged lands – commonly called marshes, swamps, sloughs, bogs, and flats – that support aquatic or semi-aquatic vegetation.

“In Chautauqua Lake, much of the south basin and other bays and shoals with more than 12.4 contiguous acres of submergent vegetation have been functioning as wetland for many decades,” Mahar wrote in his response to Goodell and Borrello.

Borrello and Goodell called on the proposed regulations to include a sentence saying, “Navigable waters in an inland lake shall not be considered wetlands.” That language was proposed by Molitor in his comments to the DEC. “Navigable lakes, however, would never be commonly called ‘marshes, swamps, sloughs, bogs and flats’ and waters ‘substantially enclosed’ by aquatic plants would not be navigable,” Goodell and Borrello wrote in 2024.