SPRINGDALE — Until the end of September 2013, John Pennington, executive director of the Beaver Watershed Alliance, wasn’t sure if his efforts to involve community members in restoring eroded stream banks were going to get any traction at all.
“Throughout our first five meetings, only a total of about 100 people showed up,” Pennington said. “Fayetteville was about the lowest turnout, and it’s the largest population. Then there were 50 people in Winslow alone who came to our meeting there. The smallest town in the watershed, and 50 people came out.”
At that point, Pennington said, his faith was restored.
The meetings, known as the West Fork Watershed Opportunity Assessment, were part of a longer campaign known as the Beaver Lake Watershed Forest Landowner Opportunity Assessment. Its purpose is to identify specific problems within the Beaver Lake Watershed affecting water quality, from stream bank erosion to illegal dumping, by speaking directly with area residents, especially those who own land along the banks of streams and tributaries to the White River, which feeds directly into Beaver Lake.
In 2009, the Northwest Arkansas Council commissioned the “Beaver Lake Watershed Protection Study,” which outlines existing conditions as well as problematic issues throughout the approximately 1,192 square miles of the watershed area, and suggested strategies for addressing those issues.
The study’s authors, North Carolina-based Tetra Tech, estimated there was about 90,000 feet of stream bank needing restoration from erosion or other impairments. The problem, Pennington said, was locating specific problem areas.
“[The study] is really good to a certain point, but then it’s lacking,” Pennington said. “So there is 90,000 feet of stream bank that need help. OK, where are they?”
When Pennington joined the Beaver Watershed Alliance last year, after working as a Washington County extension agent for about six years, he helped devise the plan to involve residents throughout the Beaver Lake Watershed in identifying specific problems.
After first dividing the watershed into its seven subwatersheds, each of which are identified by unique U.S. Geological Survey hydrologic unit codes, Pennington and his staff began holding the public meetings in hopes of getting residents to report problems they had noticed.
Since the meetings began, Pennington said he and his staff, along with dozens of volunteers, have made numerous visits to properties along stream banks at the request of landowners.
Both Pennington and Courtney Thomas, outreach coordinator for the alliance, said there was some initial hesitation on the part of residents to the idea of inviting alliance staff onto their property.
“But once people understood that this was all completely voluntary, that we’re not an enforcement agency, they were OK with it,” Thomas said.
“Somebody will invite you out to their house, yet will still be suspicious of your intentions,” Pennington said. “[People in] Madison County, in general, are a little more cautious in accepting a new organization like ours. But we’re not the police. We’re not here to say, ‘You can’t do that.’ We’re here to help you achieve your goals.
“We don’t go after a single person — we’re just trying to help who we can help. Each person that you help tells another person,” Pennington said. “Word-of-mouth is really big over there.”
Pennington said the organization has projected public meeting dates well into 2015. Currently, the alliance has focused efforts on the West Fork and Lower White River subwatersheds, which make up the southwestern edge of the Beaver Lake Watershed, and which were identified as top priorities in the 2009 study.
“Our No. 1 priority in the West Fork area is downstream of Dye Creek,” Pennington said, adding that 25 percent of all sediment in the West Fork of the White River comes from “this one troublesome spot.”
Like many problem areas in streams in the region, sediment — loose soil — falls into waterways, simultaneously eroding banks and polluting the water with high concentrations of phosphorus and other nutrients. Pennington said erosion often begins when gravel, trees or other stabilizing factors are removed from banks.
“There are places where the river used to be 40 feet wide, and now, I [kid] you not, it’s as wide as the length of a football field,” Pennington said.
Other events, including the improper discharge of raw sewage into the White River from the West Fork Waste Water Treatment Plant in April, have led to an increase in participation from residents and property owners, Pennington said.
Gary Culp, an Arkansas Master Naturalist who frequently volunteers his time to gather water quality samples from streams throughout the watershed, said educating residents was likely to be the alliance’s biggest hurdle to encouraging participation.
“Education about water quality — how you can hurt it, how you can help it, what the best management practices are when you do run into problems,” Culp said. “People are increasingly receptive. Beaver Lake has been around for a long time. People enjoy it, and when there’s a threat to it, I think there’s an innate sensitivity to clean water. But there’s not a lot of education as to how good or how bad it is, or what we can do when it gets bad to make it better.”
Once individual sites requiring restoration are identified, Pennington and his staff will face their next challenge: finding the money to pay for the projects.
He said stream restoration projects can cost between $100-$250 per linear foot, accounting for the requisite engineering, materials, equipment, personnel, and trees and plants that are key to stabilizing stream banks.
“A track hoe, to rent it, is not cheap,” Pennington said. “Tons and tons of rock is not cheap.”
Pennington said that even if the alliance could funnel its entire $400,000 budget into restoration projects, it would take nearly 850 years to fund the projects outlined in the 2009 protection strategy.
Pennington said multiple organizations and government entities already contribute money to water quality improvement efforts throughout the state, including Ozark Water Watch, the Beaver Water District, and the Arkansas office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, an office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Everybody spends a little bit of money,” Pennington said. “And we’re an equal-opportunity fundraiser, for sure.”
Stephen Ford, the Natural Resources Conservation Service district conservationist in Madison County, said requests for federal funding channeled through the service has constantly outstripped available resources.
“We’ve got six contracts approved for the year, and we’ve just barely got $200,000,” Ford said. He said the six approved projects were selected from about 100 applications for help in restoration projects in 2014.
“We’ve had people set up for three years in a row for stream bank [restoration], and we just can’t reach them,” Ford said.
Pennington said his goal is to marshal approximately $4 million per year in funding to support restoration projects within the Beaver Lake Watershed.
“If we could, all together, add about $4 million a year, then we could do this within a century,” Pennington said. “We could actually protect Beaver Lake within one century.
“To me, that’s what the goal really is. Things can change over time,” Pennington said. “So the faster you can do what’s necessary, the more certain you are about your future.”
The next Beaver Watershed Alliance public meeting will be held at 6 p.m. today at the Brentwood Community Center, at 16945 S. Highway 71, approximately 5 miles south of West Fork.