PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2000-08-23 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Michigan Threatens Beavers Over Dams? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • In July 1997, one of Stephen Tvedten's neighbors noticed flooding on his property and traced it back to a dam on Tvedten's stream. The neighbor complained to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) on 28 July 1997, and five months later the agency responded with a letter to the offending land owner. The letter, from David Price, a local Michigan DEQ official, was blunt: The construction and maintenance of two wood debris dams across the outlet stream of Spring Pond was unauthorized because a permit must be issued prior to the start of this type of activity. The letter ordered Stephen Tvedten, the land owner, to cease and desist under penalty of elevated enforcement action: Mr. Tvedten responded to the Michigan DEQ's demand with the now widely-circulated dam letter, in which he pointed out that the debris dams he had been ordered to remove because they were constructed without permission from the state of Michigan were actually built by beavers: The DEQ later claimed they were fully aware the debris dams were beaver dams; the issue, they said, was that the beavers who built them had long since abandoned the dams, but Mr. Tvedten had been continuing to maintain and even build up the dams himself: For his part, Mr. Tvedten claimed that the dams had been abandoned because a neighbor had killed the beavers (then filed a complaint with the state because he was concerned that the untended dams would break apart and enter his property) and that no one but the beavers had ever maintained them. And contemporaneous accounts of the brouhaha quoted a Michigan DEQ spokesman as saying the agency hadn't performed an inspection before firing off their December 1997 letter to Mr. Tvedten: After some wrangling the agency ultimately dropped the issue, but not before Stephen Tvedten found an inventive way of quickly pointing out both how ludicrous and humorous the situation was. In a way dusty legal language never could, such a letter serves to drive home the silliness of Michigan DEQ's intractable posturing. The beavers are likely still ignorant of how close they came to being fined $10,000 a day for dam living expenses. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url