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Arkansas, Oklahoma should cooperate where possible, river official says Thursday, Apr 24, 2008 By Doug Thompson Arkansas News Bureau FAYETTEVILLE - Arkansas and Oklahoma could save money and get better results if they combined their water monitoring efforts and should consider the move despite the Oklahoma attorney general's lawsuit against Arkansas' poultry industry, a member of the Oklahoma Scenic Rivers Commission said Wednesday. "There are people in Oklahoma who realize great progress has been made" in reducing pollutants, said Rick Stubblefield, Adair County representative on the river commission. He spoke at a University of Arkansas-sponsored watershed conference Wednesday in Fayetteville. The conference dealt with water quality issues in the Illinois River and White River watersheds, among others. Oklahoma filed suit in federal court in 2005, claiming poultry litter from Arkansas farms is a serious pollution and health risk to scenic rivers in Oklahoma, particularly the Illinois. Whatever the result of the lawsuit, local, regional and state governments in both states will continue to monitor water quality for environmental, health and drinking water purposes, Stubblefield said. That responsibility is now spread among numerous entities. Some form of co-operative agreement to put that testing into a comprehensive package to be administered by one contractor only makes sense, although no figures are available on how much savings there might be, he said. "At the very least, we need a feasibility study in regard to such a cooperative," Stubblefield said. The suggestion made sense, Fayetteville Mayor Dan Coody said. "I'm sure part of the reason we all do our own monitoring is that we don't trust each other, but we should be able to find a third party who is trusted," Coody said. "Not only would everybody share the cost, we'd also all be on the same page as far as the data was concerned. That would be extremely helpful." The Northwest Arkansas-Northeast Oklahoma region has "500,000 people living in the Illinois River watershed now and the most conservative estimate is that we'll have 1 million living there in the next 20 years," Stubblefield said. "This is not a pristine wilderness any more, and it's going to take cooperation to protect Oklahoma's scenic rivers," he said. In another presentation, measuring the amount of "nutrients" such as phosphorus in the water is not the best standard to use in measuring water quality, said consultant Kent Thornton of FTN and Associates of Little Rock. "Nutrients, per se, are not the problem," he said. "It's the effects of nutrients such as algae bloom and loss of clarity that are the problems." Regulation and monitoring of nutrients miss the point when, for instance, high nutrient levels are reported in the middle of winter when temperatures are too cold to result in an algae bloom, he said. Algae bloom is when a serious, sudden rise in the amount of algae in water occurs when conditions are right, such as high nutrient levels during summer heat. Water quality issues also need public discussion early, said Barry Tonning of Tetra Tech, the Lexington, Ky.-based firm conducting a watershed protection study for the Beaver Lake Water District. He cited an example in Maryland where a water study proposed replanting along streams. "People were against it," he said. "It was only after we were far into the process that these objections came up. We found out that, many years before, a child had died there before people could find him, and they wanted all the vegetation mowed right down to the ground. We were able to come up with another plan that had low-lying vegetation." |
