THE FEDERAL Two-Step over who will foot the bill for the Norfork & Greer’s Ferry Federal hatcheries is on again, except this year there is no cutback, there’s no money at all.
Those who love to fish the White River system and who make a living from the river are once again at the mercy of this game of bureaucratic brinkmanship between the Federal Fisheries and Wildlife Service and the US Army Corp of Engineers.
Chop away all the bureaucratic verbiage, diversions and ideological opinion, and this comes down to one simple issue: the US Army Corp Of Engineers, screwed up the White River system ecology in the 1950s with the the Bull Shoals Dam and must pay the price.
The USACE is our BP; our 3-Mile Island and the bill for these types of long term environmental issues means coughing up millions over the long term. Comparing the White, and its beauty and fabulous fishing to a nuclear disaster might seem overly dramatic but the impact of a cold water deep draw Dam on the White River system irrevocably changed the nature of the waterway.
No more smallmouth,and other native species. All the White was good for was trout, and the fact that it became very very good for trout shouldn’t downgrade the need for continued mitigation of the environmental damage.
The 2013 Federal Budget continues the game of chicken between the Fisheries & Wildlife Service and the Corp. As the Budget documents say
The FWS will continue to work to recover costs from responsible agencies in order to focus its base funding on native fish recovery and restoration
The FWS is right in its stance that the Corp should foot the bill _ they are the one’s collecting huge revenues from the Dams. Bull Shoals & Norfork Dams returned more than $21 million to the USACE in ‘08 alone and $119m from the SWPA which sells the power from the USACE Dams in our region.
This doesn’t include the tax dollars raised by our $158 million White River fishing industry, including payroll tax and business income tax on fly shops, resorts, guides restaurants and the like whose livelihood is linked to river health, and which returns more than the annual running costs of the hatcheries.
The Corp stepped in last year with a year’s top up funding, but as we wrote at the time, without a legally binding long-term earmarked funding specifically for our hatcheries we will continue with this annual dance.
Imagine you are trying to invest in your business on the White River, where is the foundation to base your business plan. We actually fielded a call from a fly fisher in TX last month who was asking if there was still good trout fishing with the hatchery closed, based on a misinterpretation of last year’s events.
This is crazy politics damaging this river and bad economic management.
And calling for the State, or the private sector to take over the hatchery, while superficially understandable, is unhelpful at best. The mitigation hatcheries have very few friends in the upper echelons of the FWS right now, as evidence by their focus on native fish recovery, and apparently no friends in the Corp. Both of them would love to pocket the dollars which are morally owed to this river and its people and spend it on their own pet projects.
The Arkansas State Budget is tight as it is, and a State funded takeover, should only be considered as an absolute last resort. The Arkansas Budget is about the same size as the Corp’s with a myriad of demands from education, roads and the like, and equally capable of leaving the annual funding of the hatcheries at the mercy of political horse trading.
And if anyone thinks we will have better political capital with a State controlled hatchery, I’d point out the last time we tried to get anything done on these rivers, trout fishing was a minor trading card in turkey hunting politics. So you get the picture how much clout the rivers have in Arkansas recreational politics. As I say if Arkansas takes over the hatchery we will merely be shifting funding uncertainty from a Federal to a State level.
Privatization has its own pitfalls, none being the least that it won’t resolve the issue of who is going to pay for the cost of raising the fish _ plus profit margin of any operator. It really is a side issue, being driven on ideological grounds rather than a serious solution.
However If the State is forced to step in you can bet your bottom dollar we will see a significant rise in the cost of trout stamps. So in that scenario we would have the Corp keeping the monies rightfully due to mitigate the effects of the cold water releases, the Feds benefitting from a State funded industry, plus higher taxes (trout stamps) to cover the cost of the hatcheries. So in effect we would be paying double.
The bureaucrats get the gold mine and we get the shaft.
The only logical State based solution would be for legally binding, long term earmarked commitments from the USACE to Arkansas in return for the State taking over the hatcheries, or we could do the same thing with the existing FWS hatchery system.
Its all up to the Corp standing up to its obligations.
Steve Dally
