Who could disapprove of the National Park Service for getting input from citizens before deciding whether or how to change the way the Current and Jacks Fork rivers are managed? But hey. They need to listen to logic not volume.

Of course the people who rent horses are going to neigh loud and long about their needs, and so are all those folk who make money from using the bazillion (okay, 100) illegal access points or who use those access points to illegally ride their ATVs onto park grounds and race them along the streams. But the NPS should listen to this sensible whisper: 3,000 horses equals tons of manure in the rivers and 12,000 hooves digging into the banks and eroding them.

At a recent discussion in Kansas City, friends of the park equated the horse population to plopping a city of up to 20,000 humans on the banks. As one park lover noted, “The rivers aren’t set up to handle the current poop-ulation.”

The Jacks Fork is now being listed as an “impaired waterway”.

You could follow this link and have your brief say about the issue to the National Park Service via the Audubon website. If we don’t say something, we’ll be shouted down by those who want permission to pollute.

Wouldn’t you love it if, the next time you got a speeding ticket, you could promise to pay eventually and then sort of not get around to it, and the ticketing authority would just sort of … not mind? How cool would that be?  

That’s more or less what–almost–happened for the Board of Supervisors in Peirce Township down in Texas County. Peirce Township contains the headwaters of the Jacks Fork River. In 2004, the Supervisors decided to do some flood control at Dixon’s Crossing, a low water bridge on the South Prong of the headwaters, but they failed to consult the Army Corps of Engineers and get a permit before sending some slaphappy guy on a road grader to move a bunch of gravel.

A mistake.

Here’s how Dixon’s Crossing looks upstream–a lovely meandering stream, right? And here’s how the spot looked before the road grader pulled in there and did its magic. Makes you feel calm just to look at it, doesn’t it?

Here’s how it looks now.

Damn. That’s nothing but a muddy drainage ditch–muddy because straight water flows fast and does such an efficient job of carrying loosened gravel downstream. The road grader guy piled the gravel six feet high on the bank (the picture is below the fold), and the next flood moved at a spritely clip through there, you betcha, and carried that gravel downstream, clogging spots down below.

Trust me. The Corps wouldn’t have given permission for the Peirce Township Supervisors to muck around in the stream without consulting a hydrologist. And in fact, the Corps would have told them that rather than solving the flooding problem there, they were about to make it worse. But too often, the attitude in rural areas is: “Permit? We don’t need no stinkin’ permit.”

Maybe what they did was more akin to driving without a license than to getting a speeding ticket. They didn’t understand that river any better than a fourteen year old who barely knows how to shift out of park understands driving.

And once environmentalists noticed the carnage and pressured the EPA to take action, Peirce Township–not one of the wealthier areas of the state, I’d guess–got saddled with a $14,500 mitigation fine. In other words, they had to come up with a plan to spend that much money mitigating the harm they’d done.

Since then–that was 2004–nothing has been accomplished. Peirce Township submitted a plan that the EPA refused to approve in 2006; new supervisors were elected in Peirce Township and the EPA personnel changed; the new people at the EPA dropped the ball; and the new supervisors, well, they didn’t do much to remind anybody that they had an outstanding ticket which had to be paid by October of this year.

The whole matter might have slumped off into oblivion but for one buttinsky environmentalist named Tom Kruzen, who asked the EPA recently what progress had been made on the issue. “Peirce Township? Dixon’s Crossing?” they said. “What are you talking about?” the EPA wanted to know.

It’s taken considerable nudging from Kruzen and Ken Midkiff of the Sierra Club to get them in gear, and it’s probably too late for the township to implement any mitigation plan by October the first. But at least, thanks to Kruzen, the ticket will have to be paid, and somebody else will do the mitigation. Finally. Five years after the fact.

I wonder if Peirce Township will have an institutional memory of this debacle. When new supervisors are elected, will that $14,500 fine hurt enough to be remembered so that in future they’re less cavalier about the permitting process?

Maybe.