By Joe Mosby
Arkansas News Correspondent
LITTLE ROCK — A quarter-century effort to secure a minimum flow of fish-sustaining water on the White River neared completion today with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s approval of a partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The lengthy and detailed agreement commits the commission meeting terms of Section 132 of the federal 2006 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act.
Modifications have been under way since 2009 on Norfork dam and lake and will now begin on Bull Shoals dam and lake. These include a pipeline through Norfork dam, generator adaptations at Bull Shoals and adjustments to parks on the lakes and nearby county roads, since water will be at slightly higher levels part of the time.
The issue has been a complex and hotly contested matter between more than one federal agency, state agencies and private citizens over who controls the water at Bull Shoals and Norfork lakes, which are key components of the White River system that lies mostly in Arkansas but partly in Missouri.
Downstream from dams on the lakes is some of the nation’s finest trout fishing. Trout came in after the dams were built and resulting cold water releases wiped out the native fish — primarily bass, crappie, bream and catfish.
The federal government agreed to furnish trout as compensation for the lost fish. Trout took to the nutrient-rich water, and a major industry sprang from it — float fishing for trout.
The problem was in periods of little rainfall, late summer and early fall, the White and its tributary North Fork, become nearly stagnant with little water coming through the two dams. Oxygen levels plummet and fish suffer, sometimes resulting in extensive die-offs.
But the dams were built with congressional mandates of flood control and electricity generation. Norfork was completed in 1943, Bull Shoals in 1951. Fish and recreation were not mentioned in the acts creating the dams and the lakes.
Southwest Power Administration is a federal agency handling the electricity output and has maintain firm control of lake levels for decades. The agreement to maintain a minimum flow of water year-round came only after years of negotiation, debate, multiple meetings and congressional nudging.
“We went to Washington, met with our people in Congress and laid in the floor and kicked and hollered about minimum flow,” Forrest Wood, a former member of the Game and Fish Commission, said today.
In other action, the commission accepted a $115,000 grant from the Walton Family Foundation for replacing bottomland hardwoods and restoring wetlands on 4,000 privately owned acres in Chicot and Desha counties in southeast Arkansas.
Also, the panel gave Edgar Colvin of Grant County permission to erect a monument, at his expense, at the agency’s Lee’s Ferry Access on the Saline River in Grant County, at the site of a Civil War battle between Confederate soldiers and Union forces crossing the river in 1863.
