EUREKA SPRINGS — Kirk Dupps said he’s tired of waiting for the federal government to build a trout hatchery along the tail water below Beaver Dam. A former chairman of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, Dupps has begun an effort to get it done with state funds.
Dupps spoke last week to the state Legislature’s joint committee on Public Health, Welfare and Labor, which met at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs.
He urged the 11 legislators at the meeting to contact members of Arkansas’ congressional delegation to ask for their help.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers promised the hatchery as mitigation for killing native fish when it dammed the White River in 1966 to create Beaver Lake, said Dupps, who lives near the dam, which is about eight miles from Eureka Springs.
Congress voted in 1976 to authorize $6 million for construction of the hatchery, but the money was never appropriated. The project has since been re-approved but never funded, Dupps said.
The commission could pay for the construction without having to wait for funding from the federal government, Dupps said. The commission has the $8 million to $10 million needed to build the hatchery, he said.
“I believe their budget is sufficient to fund it over a two-year period,” Dupps said.
Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the commission, said the money Dupps referred to is earmarked for other projects.
Dupps said the commission can’t appropriate the funds until the Corps approves a water allocation study saying the lake can provide enough water for the hatchery while still serving entities that already use water from the lake.
“I think the water allocation would take [the hatchery] off dead center,” he said.
A 2000 study by the Corps indicated there was more than enough water for those purposes, Dupps said.
Julia Smethurst, the Corps’ project manager for the Beaver Trout Production Facility, as the hatchery is called, said another water allocation study should be completed next spring.
Even if the state wants to pay for construction of the hatchery, it can’t do so until that study is completed and the water allocation approved, she said.
“All of the water that is impounded at Beaver Dam has already been accounted for,” said Patricia Anslow, chief of the Corps’ planning and environmental division for the Little Rock District. “For us to reallocate anything basically changes the operation of the lake.”
One of those other lake water users is the U.S. Department of Energy’s Southwestern Power Administration.
“The folks that pay for that electricity are paying back the Treasury for the cost of the original dam construction,” Anslow said.
Dupps, who served on the Game and Fish Commission from 1993 to 2000 and was chairman in 1999, has committed to raising about $4 million to build a visitors center next to the hatchery. The hatchery, visitors center and a dry-run creek where children could fish would serve as a tourist draw for the area, he said.
Dupps owns a ranch across the White River from the site of the proposed hatchery.
Beaver Dam was built with an 18-inch intake pipe valve to provide water for a hatchery, Dupps said.
The valve could provide 17,000 gallons of water per minute, which is enough to produce 1.2 million trout per year.
That’s about the same number of trout that are provided by a hatchery at Lake Norfork, he said.
In 1998, the Corps leased the Beaver Lake hatchery site to the commission for $1 per year for the next 50 years, Dupps said. The agency built a regional office on the property.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 10/24/2011