The Board of Island County Commis-sioners passed an ordinance meant to remedy faults in three county environmental-protection provisions.

The county has yet to address four other, more challenging deficiencies among the seven noted in June 2015 by the state’s Growth Management Hearings Board.

The Hearings Board took issue with the county’s definition of “reasonable use.” The commissioners agreed Tuesday to use a longer and more complicated definition also found elsewhere in development regulations.

The Hearings Board objected to the length of inactivity the county wanted to permit before rights to farm are lost if the farming impinges on ecologically critical areas. The commissioners agreed that the period of inactivity may last five years, with a single optional extension of up to three years.

The commissioners removed language suggesting the county has any control over beavers or beaver dams, noting that beavers can still be removed by an emergency declaration of the planning director and under a critical-areas alteration.

All three of these fixes were suggested by the county’s planning department in a December memo.

The commissioners did not say Tuesday why it took five months to enact them.

The county was required to review and update its fish and wildlife habitat conservation regulations in 2005, but it failed to act until watchdog group Whidbey Environmental Action Network, or WEAN, obtained an order from the Hearings Board in 2013, that group said.

Steve Erickson, WEAN’s litigation coordinator, said on Tuesday that two of the day’s fixes were satisfactory but added that the provision allowing farmers up to eight years of inactivity “exposes them  to violations of the federal Clean Water Act while remaining perfectly compliant with county code.”

The county’s planning commission set a public hearing for Monday, May 23 to review fixes to the other four provisions.

Those are “far more contentious” than the three addressed Wednesday, Erickson said. They deal with safeguarding the habitats of rare plants, prairies, oak woodlands and the Western toad.

The county sought to appeal the Hearings Board’s June 2015 decision with regard to those four provisions but in November was stymied when the Island County Prosecuting Attorney’s office failed to file the appeal on time.