Jim Hightower’s December newsletter had this buck-up advice:

Too often we progressive types get all hang-dog about what’s going wrong, failing to acknowledge that many things are actually going right, and that we’re making gains on the greedheads and goof balls who for so long have been running roughshod over common sense and the common good.

Presidential Appointees ………  Yes, Obama has hung such albatrosses as Timmy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Ben Bernanke around our economic necks. But he’s also made some sterling appointments, including Sonia Sotomayor to the Supremes, Hilda Solis to head Labor, Lisa Jackson to run EPA, Steven Chu as Energy chief, Jared Bernstein as chief economic advisor to Joe Biden, and Kathleen Merrigan to be the number two at the Ag Department.

Many other solid progressives have taken over as assistant secretaries, program heads, regional directors, and other key positions- these are the hands-on officials at the operational level of government. If you’ve ever seen the cable show “Dirty Jobs,” you’ll have a sense of the challenges these mid-level appointees face. After Bush & Buckshot’s eight-year frat-house party, the soiling of government programs was so bad that cleaning them would take a giant can of Comet and a wire brush, but the Obamacans have this scrub job well underway (though their efforts get little media attention).

One example of the clean-up process is EPA’s recent moves to reverse The Bushites’ horrific policy of encouraging mountaintop removal. This obscene mining practice by Big Coal amounts to free environmental rape of Appalachia (see Lowdown, November 2005) The new crew at EPA is taking regulatory and scientific steps to stop it. First, they’ve placed 79 mountaintop removal permits that the previous EPA honchos tried to shove through on hold, pending environmental review. Second, they’ve launched a major scientific study of whether the explosion of mountaintops and subsequent shoving of the rubble down into the valleys below destroys streams, thus violating the Clean Water Act.

Here in Missouri, Ken Midkiff, director of the Clean Water Campaign for the Sierra Club, can tell you about the new EPA chief, Lisa Jackson. He went straight to the top when he finally understood that EPA District 7 was going to let the old boys on the Peirce Township Board of Supervisors get away with not paying the $14,500 fine for mauling Dixon’s Crossing on the headwaters of the Jacks Fork River.

They changed it from this:

To this:

Which caused this, when it rains:

Environmentalists threw a fit and got the Township saddled with the fine, which the Supervisors had five years to pay. Their time was up in October of 2009; they hadn’t paid; and the EPA was prepared to let it slide. But Midkiff wasn’t.

He wrote Lisa Jackson four times, and she responded by ordering the regional office to make the buggers pay up. The money hasn’t actually changed hands yet, but if it doesn’t, Midkiff will raise some more hell. In the big scheme of the EPA, $14,500 is a piddling amount. But Jackson gets the principle of the thing. And she will listen if he has to come kvetching back to her about it.

And that was the point of Hightower’s letter.

Ken Midkiff of the Sierra Club has a razor tongue when it’s called for and the gift of persistence. He has been applying both to an official at EPA 7 and to a couple of bumbling bureaucrats in the Missouri Department of Natural Resources over their failure to enforce penalties on local officials who have scarred and maimed two of our beautiful Ozark waterways.

This is how Dixon’s Crossing on the headwaters of the Jacks Fork used to look, before Peirce Township, ignoring the permit requirements, brought in a road grader.

And ruined it.

That was in 2004. Once environmentalists noticed the carnage, they contacted EPA7 and eventually a $14,000 fine was levied. Peirce Township had until the end of September of this year, that’s five years, to spend $14 thou mitigating the damage. So all through October, Midkiff has been dashing off e-mails to Howard Bunch at EPA7, asking whether the fines are being enforced and getting wishy washy references to “working with” Peirce Township. He began to suspect the worst:

Did EPA7 grant an extension to Peirce Township?  This is a YES or NO question.

If so, what is the length of the extension?     How many weeks, months, years, decades, millennia?

These questions are not difficult to answer.

Please respond.

He finally faced the maddening truth, that no penalty would be forthcoming and he pointed out that Peirce County Supervisors knew when they broke the law that a permit was required.

I just learned that Peirce Township of Texas County was under a “cease and desist” order for a similar sand-and-gravel operation on a tributary of the Jacks Fork (Pine Creek?) AND the supervisors had attended a class on sand-and-gravel mining at which obtaining a permit was discussed.

They were not, in fact, ignorant of the federal requirement for obtaining a 404 CWA permit.  To the contrary, they were well aware, but flouted the law anyhow.   Just downstream of the illegal work on the Jacks Fork River is the boundary of the Ozark National Scenic Riverway.    If this type of illegal activity is allowed to impact a nationally-protected river, then there is little hope for protection of anything else.

To reiterate:  The Settlement Agreement term expired as of the end of September, for illegal activities in the summer of 2004.  The Peirce Township Board of Supervisors knowingly broke federal law and the lawbreakers had 5 years to make amends, but you have graciously decided not to enforce the law, instead granting an extension.  MDC folks looked for mitigation projects, but found none – so I can only conclude that Peirce Township will submit some “make work” mitigation proposals.

Finally, Linda Garrett of the Texas County Commission informed Tony Orchard of the Shannon County Commission that Shannon County could conduct sand-and-gravel mining on Big Creek (a major tributary of the Current River) without obtaining any federal permit, because all that could be expected would be a slap on the wrist.  Fines, penalties?  Forget about it!

Think about  it. Linda Garrett of Texas County–Peirce Township’s county–advised Shannon County Commissioners not to worry about ignoring permit requirements. She should know. And the Shannon County officials took her advice. On a section of beautiful Big Creek, a tributary of the Current River, they wreaked similar havoc this last year to what Peirce Township did at Dixon’s Crossing in 2004.

Apparently, the Commissioners decided to wave a dismissive hand at those interfering city folk, because, without permission of any kind, they channelized (straightened) about a thousand yards of the creek, built “wing-dams”  to make sure the meandering stream flowed faster, and piled gravel twenty feet high on each side of the creek.

Presumably, the reason they did this was to stop the flooding of a nearby road, which they then rebuilt. Unfortunately, they chose to ignore the fact that the road was on private property owned by the L.A.D. Foundation and that the foundation did not want that road rebuilt. Indeed, the foundation’s board had offered the County an easement to build another road on higher ground. It was a sensible offer, especially considering that federal funds are available for building roads in that area, so doing so would not have cost the county anything–would have provided some jobs, in fact.

Furthermore, Ken Midkiff of the Sierra Club tells me that hydrologists and engineers have informed him that the changes to Big Creek not only won’t stop the flooding in the spot, they are likely to increase it.

And that same Tony Orchard who got advice from the helpful lady in Texas County? He had the gall to flip environmentalists the bird:

Tony Orchard, the presiding commissioner, told the Post-Dispatch that “Some people are just going to get carried away if you move a piece of grass the wrong way.” It’s beyond him to imagine why anyone would care what they did to Big Creek. It’s also beyond the trio of dunces, or so Commissioner Dale Counts claims, to understand all that bureaucratic red tape for permits to breathe and certification before you can cross the road. He didn’t know about all those hoops the commission was supposed to jump through, all right?

For all the good it is doing, Midkiff is complaining bitterly to Tim Duggan and Jack McManus at the MDNR:

I was distressed to hear that you are “working with” lawbreakers.   The Shannon County commissioners knew full well that they were required to obtain a federal 404 permit and that DNR must issue a 401 Certification.  Shannon County Commission knowingly – perhaps willfully – violated the law.

A representative of the US Army Corps of Engineers (responsible for issuing 404 permits) told me they would never have granted permission for the blatant travesty that occurred.

And, yet, you work with those who perpetrated the mess and violated state and federal law in doing so.

Midkiff is disgusted with Duggan and McManus, as well as with AG Chris Koster, for letting Shannon County off the hook. Not to mention Howard Bunch at EPA7. He’s concluded that sometimes “the agencies and individuals that are to protect our natural resources are asleep at the wheel.” And they refuse to wake up even when he jabs them in the ribs.

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.