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ARKANSAS
REACTS TO CLEAN WATER ACT REVISIONS The January 10 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette records at some length the proceedings of a town meeting in El Dorado, Arkansas, sponsored by the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service, to provide a forum for comments on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's pending proposal to revise Total Daily Maximum Levels (TDML) of sedimentation to enable a federal permitting process to govern forest operations near rivers deemed vulnerable. Organizers had expected 400 citizens to attend. "In all the forestry meetings I've attended," said John Shannon, director of the Arkansas Forestry Commission, "I've never seen a crowd one tenth this size." Over 1,100 individual showed up: approximately 800 tree farmers and 300 loggers. It is putting it mildly to say that feeling ran strong against the proposal, in spite of assurances from Bill Hathaway, EPA's water-quality point man for the region, that "you don't have a serious problem in Arkansas." Reporter Chuck Plunkett, in addition, supplies statistics, acknowledged by EPA, showing consistent improvement in "timber industry" water impacts and the news that "the forest industry isn't included among EPA's leading sources of damage to waterbodies," and "the length of river and stream miles impaired from natural causes is almost twice that of miles affected by forest industry." The record from the three-hour hearing has been provided to the official EPA comment record, which officially closed on January 20. (This 2,000-word article's text is available from the Democrat-Gazette's on-line archive at http://library.ardemgaz.com/, where the search term "EPA" brings it up. However, a fee of $1.95 is assessed to view or download.) Return to Public Policy Archive Forest Resources Association
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