Editor’s note: This is the debut of “Growthwatch,” a new occasional column that looks at how cities, counties and states around the country are dealing with some of the same growth issues that affect Lawrence.

Kansas transportation officials are trying to sell a Baker Wetlands route for the South Lawrence Trafficway with the promise of building even more wetlands nearby.

But a new study in New Jersey which has some of the strictest mitigation policies in the country says the success rate of new wetlands there was a “dismal” 48 percent. At 16 of the 90 sites studied, no new wetlands were created at all.

And, critics said, restored wetlands along some state highways did particularly poorly. The failures were attributed to poor state oversight of mitigation projects.

“This study demonstrates what we already know by instinct,” George Hawkins, director of the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Assn., told the Trenton (N.J.) Times. “Nature locates wetlands where they ought to be … covering them over with concrete and thinking you can re-create them elsewhere is a flawed concept.”

Mike Rees, chief counsel for the Kansas Department of Transportation, said there have been plenty of failures in wetlands mitigation nationally. But it won’t happen here, he said.

“We’re not just going to plant and go home,” he said.

He said the man-made Santa Fe Wetlands, created in the early 1990s at 31st Street and Haskell Avenue, was a good example that it has already worked here.

“I don’t think we have any question that these (new wetlands) aren’t going to turn out to be successful,” Rees said. “We’ve got the experience.”

Think Home Depot’s three-year effort to build a store in Lawrence has dragged out a long time? In San Francisco, there are kindergartners who weren’t alive when the chain announced plans for a store there and the store isn’t open yet.

Unlike the battle in Lawrence, which has mainly been about location and the city’s cost to improve a nearby intersection, the six-year debate in San Francisco has been about whether the city even wants “big-box” stores.

San Francisco’s board of supervisors even passed a measure that would require such stores to jump through additional planning hoops to build, but it was vetoed by Mayor Willie Brown.

Home Depot now hopes to have its San Francisco store built by late 2003. But company spokesperson Evette Davis told the San Francisco Chronicle there was still work to be done.

“I realize,” she said, “this is a long way from being over.”

And while Douglas County continues to debate the five-acre exemption, word comes from Colorado of efforts to get rid of a similar rule there: The 35-acre exemption.

The Rocky Mountain News reports that a developer there wants to give counties the right to increase the exemption to 160 acres from 35 acres , giving local governments more control over how and where development occurs.

Like the Douglas County rule, Colorado allows rural property owners to subdivide their land in chunks up to 35 acres to build houses without triggering subdivision regulations.

The argument there is similar to the debate here. Opponents say increasing the size of the exemption violates property rights and would make it harder to divide their land for sale.

The initiative could go on the Colorado ballot for voter approval in November.