Landowners and government officials in Missouri and Arkansas are concerned about a proclamation from the Secretary of the Interior designating the 700 miles long White River and it’s entire 17.8 million acre watershed as a National Blueway.
The authority to create National Blueways was asserted by Secretarial Order #3321 issued last year. Thus far the Connecticut River, which runs 410 miles through four states, and the White River have been designated as National Blueways. These mandates from the Department of the Interior are part of the America's Great Outdoors Initiative launched in 2010 by President Obama under the auspices of a Presidential Memorandum. The goal of the initiative is to reinforce community-level efforts aimed at conserving outdoor spaces and getting citizens outside.
The purpose of making the White River a National Blueway is to help federal, state, and local partners share management resources and best practices, and to improve the collaborative stewardship of the White River watershed. The designation doesn’t establish any new protections or regulations, but simply recognizes and supports existing local and regional conservation, recreation, and restoration efforts by coordinating ongoing federal, state, and local activities.
All this sounds fine, so what’s the concern? The problem is 1.2 million people who live, work and play in the watershed were not consulted in the matter. No public hearings, no public presentations, no discussions in state legislatures, no considerations in Congress. Partners supporting the White River National Blueway are primarily the Dept. of the Interior, the USDA Forest Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers, plus private conservation organizations like Ducks Unlimited, the National Wildlife Refuge Association, and The Nature Conservancy. Some other organizations signed on such as the Missouri Department of Conservation, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, the Arkansas Canoe Club, and the cities of Augusta and Clarendon, Arkansas. Despite all the talk in press releases about fostering community-level and local interactions, key stakeholders left out of the loop include: area residents, landowners, municipal governments, county officials, state legislatures, and Congress.
With this background, who can blame folks for being skeptical about whether this new program is truly a plan to promote river conservation and outdoor recreation or whether it is an effort to create new land use designations bypassing the considerations of citizens and elected officials? Some counties in the White River watershed are considering actions to abrogate the National Blueways designation within their boundaries. State wildlife and conservation organizations are withdrawing their support. State legislators are speaking out against the plan. Congressional delegations are asking the interior secretary to delay action until more is known about how areas within the National Blueway will be impacted.
A sad lesson about how not to create and lead a government program. When non-elected officials launch public plans without inviting public participation the result will be surprise, skepticism, and pushback. And when federal administrators talk about programs that include community-level partnerships, they must involve more than those who reside in and around the “community” of Washington, D.C.
