Imagine a store that, rather than making customers pay for items they break, requires them to pay 24 times the value of the broken item. People would stop shopping there because the rule is unfair. Yet cities across the nation are deceptively imposing a similar unfair system on their citizens through “no-net-loss” ordinances.

In theory, no-net-loss should be a 1-to-1 trade: For every acre of wetland that is developed by a builder, another acre of wetland is recreated elsewhere. In reality, the opposite is happening. Landowners are required to pay for restoration on far more acreage than they ever disturbed. Through deceptive naming, the government presents an uncompromising system of inflated mitigation fees as a simple conservation effort.

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Take Long Beach, Washington, where the government requires landowners who alter even a fraction of an acre of wetland to “offset” the impact by restoring, creating, or enhancing many times that amount elsewhere. Landowners who affect 1 acre of wetland may be required to restore 6, 12, or even 24 acres of wetland in return.

Long Beach relies on........

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