The starting gun has sounded for growth in Northwest Arkansas, and the race is on to protect water quality before it's too late, said John Pennington, executive director of the Beaver Watershed Alliance.
Pennington started sounding out local water agencies this fall on adding a water conservation fee to their water bills to pay for conservation efforts. An exact fee schedule hasn't been set. Pennington has suggested numbers anywhere between 25 cents-$1 a month for a homeowner's bill and 3-5 cents per 1,000 gallons for commercial operations.*
Beaver Lake in 2055
Without improvements to the watershed surrounding the lake there will be a 14 percent increase in algae-feeding nutrients and a 21 percent increase in sediment eroded from stream beds and dumped in the lake by the year 2055.
Source: Beaver Lake Watershed Protection Strategy
If the four water authorities served by Beaver Lake agree to a fee, the Beaver Watershed Alliance would coordinate with other agencies working in the watershed, including the Northwest Arkansas Land Trust and the Fayetteville-based Watershed Conservation Resource Center, on what works with stream restoration, Pennington said.
Doing nothing, would be a mistake, Pennington said.
There is a plan for improvement. The Beaver Lake Watershed Protection Strategy calls for restoring stream bed vegetation, best management practices for pastures, talking to cities and developers about runoff from construction sites, adding ditches near unpaved roads to filter the dust they create and better data about the health of streams leading to the lake and the lake water. The alliance is doing work, especially along the West Fork of the White River, but funding is limited, Pennington said.
Sediment carries nitrogen and phosphorus from the ground into the water, Pennington said. These nutrients accumulate in Beaver Lake and feed algae. Erosion compounds the problem.
An increase in population means less farmland and more pavement and can increase erosion, Pennington said. Slowing the rate at which sediment washes into Beaver Lake is like pretreating the watershed, Pennington said.
Pavement doesn't filter water, said Nora Wahlund, research analyst with Earth Economics, a Tacoma, Wash., nonprofit organization that researches the economic impact of ecological policy. Pavement just allows water to run off. Sand and soil are used by nature and in the drinking water filtration process, she said.
It is hard to put a price tag on the value of the natural environment, Wahlund said. Wahlund cites Denver as an example where years of wildfires in the late 1990s took out forested areas around the Strontia Springs Reservoir. Infrastructure improvements, water treatment and sediment removal has cost $26 million over the years, Wahlund said.
If the quality of Beaver Lake drops it could cost $40 million in additional water treatment for the Beaver Water District and $800,000 annually, Pennington said.
The question of how to pay for improvements to natural resources is a rising issue for many municipalities, Wahlund said.
"You're not late to the game," Wahlund said.
Northwest Arkansas isn't the first to look at a conservation fee for water bills.
In 2007, Central Arkansas Water had a problem. The water authority serves Little Rock, North Little Rock and parts of Pulaski County from intakes based on Lake Maumelle and Lake Winona. That year developers had planned 185 homes near the water authority's intake on Lake Maumelle and 87 houses across the lake.
Graham Rich, chief operating officer for Central Arkansas Water, said he knew if the water authority wanted to see conservation efforts put into place, it would involve setting aside money. In May 2009, the authority added a watershed protection fee of 45 cents to every household's water bill. There was a little pushback initially, Rich said.
Since that time, the authority has purchased 2,500 acres of land using this money and is working on management plans that will thin heavily forested areas, encourage native grasses and other projects that will filter and direct runoff into the lake, Rich said. The water authority owns 10,000 acres next to the lake and including 8,000 acres managed by Arkansas Game and Fish, which allow for public access.
"We're not out to buy the entire watershed. We can't afford to do that," Rich said.
Right now the Northwest Arkansas Land Trust can't afford to purchase any property, said Terri Lane, executive director. As a result land conservation is haphazard because the cost of adding a conservation easement to prevent future development or donating land for the trust to manage rests with landowners, Lane said.
If Beaver Lake water quality drops, Jeff Marley, president of the Mount Olive Water District board, is concerned that environmental enforcement agencies will look to landowners upstream. Mount Olive water comes from Beaver Lake. Marley, who has worked with the alliance for years, lives on the White River just outside of Elkins.
As a rural water consumer, Marley can use 100,000 gallons of water to cool and water his chickens on a hot summer day. A watershed protection fee of 5 cents per 1,000 gallons of water would cost him a little, Marley said. But every bill has a fee, he said. If there's a solution to fixing the watershed's problems, and the money would make it happen, then he could get behind a fee.
"I'll spend a little bit on it," Marley said. "But the alternative might be a whole lot more severe and more expensive."
No one has to tell Marley there's a problem with erosion. He's been watching the water eat into his farmland for 30 years. He remembers pulling fences on a January day after a freeze and heavy rain when the swollen river started to erode and hoping things didn't get worse. They did.
Marley had the prescribed 100-foot buffer of trees and canes between the river bed and his bottom land when the erosion problem started. The river pulled it away. He used to grow wheat down in the bottoms, Marley said, planting it against the current so it would hold onto the ground. But when the river flooded he could count the wheat rows that slid off as the bank ate into the farmland. The stream bed is now 600 to 700 feet wide.
Farmers don't want their land and their living to wash downstream, but the cost sometimes outweighs the benefit, said Marley.
"Do you spend $100,000 to save 3 acres worth $2,000?" he asked.
The erosion problem at his farm has slowed. It could be the result of work upstream, but it's hard to tell, he said.
Preventing erosion can be expensive if a farmer is putting in rocks to slow the stream or it could be as simple as poking willow cuttings into the damp stream bed, Marley said. No matter what the solution, every high water event tests the work.
Marley supports more education for landowners and research into proven fixes for the stream and river beds. Landowners want to know their investments will pay off.
Water boards are asking the same question.
Scott Borman, general manager for the Benton Washington Regional Public Water Authority, said his board wants to know what the fee will pay for, how much it will cost customers and what the payoff is before they commit to the idea. Pennington presented to the regional authority in August.
The authority has seen fluctuation in water quality on Beaver Lake. Heavy spring rain and summer heat combined to change the pH at the authority's intake from May to August this year. The corresponding change in chemicals to correct the pH cost three times more, Borman said.
"Any time the water is dirtier, it costs more to treat," he said.
Water authorities want to see a cost analysis that shows how conservation spending will affect the bottom line before they will endorse a fee, Borman said.
Rich said efforts in central Arkansas are in their infancy, but the fee raises $1 million annually for efforts to keep water clean.
"I think we've shown it can work and it can be painless," he said. "Most people don't even know they're paying for it."
NW News on 10/12/2015
*CORRECTION: Businesses and residential customers would be charged the same for a conservation fee if such a fee, as requested by the Beaver Watershed Alliance, is adopted. The information was incorrect in this article.