Critics say distrust torpedoed Blueway

Senator: It ‘came out of nowhere’

State Sen. Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View, poses on the White River with Dan Stewart, president of the Stone County Cattlemen’s Association. The Blueway plan appeared “in the dark of night,” Irvin, a staunch opponent of the plan, said. Stewart said the lack of public debate angered him.

State Sen. Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View, poses on the White River with Dan Stewart, president of the Stone County Cattlemen’s Association. The Blueway plan appeared “in the dark of night,” Irvin, a staunch opponent of the plan, said. Stewart said the lack of public debate angered him.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

WASHINGTON - It was supposed to be a federal “blue ribbon” program, designed to highlight the raw, natural beauty of the White River and draw hunters, boaters and fishermen to its banks, streams and tributaries.

photo

Special to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Stan Ward of Clarendon motors up the White River earlier this month. The National Blueway designation that was proposed to highlight and preserve the waterway that draws hunters, hikers, boaters and fishermen to its banks instead fostered distrust of the government.

Instead, for some, the National Blueway designation, which the federal government conferred upon the White River in January and then yanked in the face of pressure from Arkansas officials, was seen as a presumptuous “taking” of private land by the central government. The stealthy rush to make the designation, some believed, indicated that the federal government never seemed to care about - or didn’t bother to communicate with - people who live in the communities along the river.

The White River - which begins in the Boston Mountains in Northwest Arkansas, flows through the Ozarks in-to Missouri, and back down through east Arkansas into the Mississippi River - was the second river to be named a Blueway.

The purpose of the designation - according to a nomination that was backed by 26 state agencies, local officials, environmental groups and sporting associations - was to restore endangered and threatened wildlife populations in the area, improve water quality in the lower Mississippi River and maintain wetlands.

Dan Stewart, president of the Stone County Cattlemen’s Association, said the first he heard of the designation was on a television news report after it was a done deal. He said the lack of public debate about the Blueway designation angered him.

“I’ve never seen quite so much distrust in the government,” Stewart said. “I haven’t seen anything [in the plan] in particular that would be detrimental. But if something gets slipped in the back door, people want to know what’s going on.”

State Sen. Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View, said the federal designation came “in the dark of night.”

“At the federal level, policy was created outside of the regular process,” she said. “That’s where the distrust comes in.”

According to several surveys, faith in the federal government has slipped sharply. Polls this year by Gallup, Pew and Rasmussen show that during the past five decades, a majority of people have come to believe that the government can’t be trusted.

Alec Tyson, a research analyst at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said faith in government ebbed during the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal, but surged in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Since then, trust in government has declined.

“We’re absolutely at a low point,” he said.

It wasn’t just the lack of communication from the federal government that worried Irvin, who had to leave her riverfront property by canoe in 2008 when the White River flooded.

She said the nominating document was full of general goals that either seemed in conflict with one another or that seemed harmless but would actually impose burdens on farmers in the river’s watershed.

For instance, one of the goals was to reduce human “encroachment” along the river.

“What does that mean?” Irvin asked. And how, she wondered, does that jibe with another stated goal, which was to invite more recreation and sporting activity along the river.

Another goal, she said, was to restore the flow of the river and its habitat to “historic” levels.

“What history?” she asked. To Irvin, and others, the document did not spell out the changes desired.

There were other problems, Irvin said.

For instance, the plan called for mandatory 180-foot buffer zones along the river, where farmers would not be allowed to plant. In the plan’s short-term vision, farms would have to reduce their water consumption by 5 percent over one to three years. Over three to seven years, farm irrigation in the watershed would have to use 15 percent less water, and 20 percent more agricultural land would be flooded seasonally for wildlife habitat.

“This came out of nowhere,” Irvin said.

And the designation included no funding to compensate property owners for potential drops in property value resulting from the increased restrictions.

On June 28, the heads of several Arkansas agencies that previously supported the Blueway designation wrote to U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to request that she withdraw the White River designation.

The letter was signed by Mike Knoedl, director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission; Randy Young, director of the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission; Chris Colclasure, director of the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission; Gene Higginbotham, executive director of the Arkansas Waterways Commission; Joe Fox, director of the Arkansas Forestry Commission; and Richard Davies, director of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism.

“While this is a great honor for the state of Arkansas, the conflicts and controversy surrounding the designation are such that we must respectfully request that you remove the National Blueway designation from the White River,” they wrote.

Fox said the process used to announce the Blueway designation was flawed. The affected area took up nearly one-quarter of the state, and many county and city officials and state representatives from the area were not properly notified, he said. Their input on the nomination wasn’t sought, and “they didn’t take ownership of the designation,” he said.

The nature of the federal “taking” associated with the plan was “entirely incorrect,” Fox said. He said critics who lambasted the federal objectives associated with the plan simply had a “misunderstanding” about what the designation would mean, and he said the designation would have resulted in no new government restrictions on private property.

“There’s a broad distrust of the federal government, not just in Arkansas, but throughout the nation,” he said. “The misunderstanding fed that distrust.”

Fox said federal, state and local groups have worked on natural-resources projects in the area for decades and have developed trust and cooperation. He said the state groups withdrew their support of the designation in the hope that other federal-state projects along the river can continue without the distraction of the Blueway title.

Ducks Unlimited, one of the groups that originally supported the Blueway designation, now supports the withdrawal of it. The southern stretches of the river are home to the largest winter concentration of mallard ducks in North America. But, said Andi Cooper, the group’s spokesman, Ducks Unlimited still supports the goals of the program and withdrew its support only because the broad base of support from environmental, local and recreational groups had started to erode.

She said the designation was “innocuous” and that it was “a real shame” that anti-government sentiment led to the designation’s demise.

“The designation was never intended to do anything other than draw attention to the importance of the White River,” Cooper said. “I can only guess that people misunderstood what the designation meant. They passed up what could have been a positive thing for their area.”

On July 3, the U.S. Department of Interior rescinded the White River Blueway designation. Two weeks later, Jewell put the entire program on hold.

Though critics of the program, including Irvin, are glad that the federal government has no plans to revive the Blueway designation, they remain disappointed by what they say is a lack of communication from the Obama administration.

“To date this administration has met our request for more information on the Blueway program with silence,” U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., said at a House Natural Resources Committee field hearing July 29 in West Plains, Mo. “They refuse to appear before Congress to answer substantive questions and have failed to provide us documentation we have requested.”

Rebecca Wodder, a senior adviser to the Department of Interior who supervised the program, was invited to the field hearing but did not attend. She also did not attend a July House hearing in Washington on the matter.

A spokesman for the department said Wodder was out of the office last week dealing with a “family matter.” Jewell, she said, also was unavailable for comment. A list of questions, submitted at the spokesman’s request, went unanswered.

Stone County Judge Stacey Avey said he was disappointed that he heard about the designation secondhand, after it had already been made. But, he said, communities along the White River would have benefited by being part of a Blueway, because the title would have helped steer more federal funds to conservation projects in the area.

“I’m not 100 percent convinced this was a bad thing,” he said, a comment that Stewart, the Stone County cattle farmer, didn’t contradict.

“It was how they went about doing it,” Stewart said.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/25/2013