LOWELL - The people of Northwest Arkansas need to think about how to preserve the watershed that serves them, and they need to do it now, visiting water-quality experts said Thursday.
Peter Stangel, a spokesman for the South Carolina-based nonprofit U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities, and Tracy Mehan, a consultant for environmental consulting firm Cadmus, spoke to about 30 individuals at the first of a series of quarterly talks for the Beaver Watershed Alliance.
The alliance promotes efforts to maintain and protect water quality throughout the Beaver Lake watershed, which covers about 1,900 square miles and spans portions of Benton, Carroll, Washington and Madison counties, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
“In general, the water here is excellent,” Stangel said. “Things are good, but you have impressive growth coming in the future. A lot of people are coming in, and that’s going to put pressures on all of your infrastructure, including water. Probably one of the greater challenges the community faces is: ‘How do we keep up with this growth?’”
In 2012, the alliance published a document titled “Beaver Lake Watershed Protection Strategy,” which outlined challenges to maintaining the health of the watershed, as well as strategies to protect it. According to the document, metropolitan development, primarily in the urban and suburban areas stretching from Bentonville to Fayetteville, is expected to increased fourfold by 2050.
Such development means vast increases in impermeable surfaces, including rooftops and asphalt roads, leading to stormwater runoff that can carry pollutants into streams, lakes and other waterways that eventually make their way to Beaver Lake.
“We all need places to live; we want growth to continue,” Stangel said. “I think what you want to do is continue in a sustainable way. The bigger picture is: How do you help the landowners in this area, who are probably already doing a good job maintaining their forest or need a little extra income to manage their forest - how do you assist them?”
Stangel said that about two-thirds of Americans get their drinking water from forested watersheds. John Pennington, executive director of the alliance, said about 67 percent of the Beaver Lake watershed is currently forested.
Mehan, who directed implementation of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act programs at the Environmental Protection Agency from 2001 to 2003, said the preponderance of research indicates that preserving water quality “on the front end” is far less expensive than trying to purify water once it has become contaminated.
“The argument for source water protection, including forested landscapes, is that it’s preventive,” Mehan said, “and therefore, usually more cost effective.”
Mehan said EPA-funded studies indicate that each dollar invested in protecting source waters saved $27 in treatment costs.
“What’s also great about protecting forested landscapes, you also get the benefit of habitat, recreation, quality of life and all the things that come with protecting landscapes,” Mehan said.
Stangel and Mehan arrived in the area Wednesday and met with members of the alliance to present case-study strategies that had worked for other watersheds across the country, many of which, like the Beaver Lake watershed, exist mainly in rural areas while serving municipal customers dozens or hundreds of miles away.
“Madison County has most of the watershed,” Pennington said. “But they also have the least of the resources.”
Robert Morgan, manager of environmental quality for the Beaver Water District and a Beaver Watershed Alliance board member, said he and other board members planned to use the case studies presented by Stangel and Mehan to shape the district’s and the alliance’s approaches toward maintaining the health of the watershed, public education and funding.
“The biggest challenge is that the majority of the people that live in the watershed don’t understand they can have an impact on improving water quality,” Morgan said. “[Many] people who live in the water-service area don’t understand that there’d be some value in paying for the service that the people in the watershed provide in cleaning up their water.”
“Making that link between where you live and where your water comes from, and the value of the service that watershed is providing, is really the threshold we’ve got to get over,” Morgan said.
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 02/21/2014