Pine Tree wildlife contract approved

Panel says OK to 6-month pact

Pengyin Chen holds up a new variety of soybeans at the Pine Tree Research Station near Colt in this 2013 file photo. Chen was the director of the soybean breeding program at the University of Arkansas System’s Division of Agriculture at the time the photo was taken.
Pengyin Chen holds up a new variety of soybeans at the Pine Tree Research Station near Colt in this 2013 file photo. Chen was the director of the soybean breeding program at the University of Arkansas System’s Division of Agriculture at the time the photo was taken.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission on Thursday unanimously agreed to a six-month contract to manage hunting and fishing at the Pine Tree Research Station owned by the University of Arkansas System's Division of Agriculture.

The agreement continues what the commission has been doing since 1999, when both parties signed a cooperative agreement for Game and Fish to manage 6,300 Pine Tree acres as a wildlife demonstration area. While that agreement was for five years, Game and Fish's management has continued since.

The Pine Tree station has been in the news since last summer, not for its wildlife and public use but for the proposed sale of the 6,300 acres, or about half of the station's total acreage. Wet and wooded, the 6,300 acres were never developed into land suitable for the row-crop research conducted elsewhere at the station, a few miles west of Colt in St. Francis County.

The land was open to the public for hunting, fishing and other outdoors activities for decades prior to the 1999 agreement.

The six-month agreement gives time for both sides to develop a longer-term contract, Chris Colclasure, the commission's deputy director, said.

The area managed by Game and Fish "is very popular for our hunting and fishing public over in the east part of the state," Colclasure told the commission in his presentation of the new contract.

"If you're a citizen in Forrest City or Wynne or some of those communities over there, this is your place, this is where you go, this is your Bayou Meto or Hurricane Lake, this is it for them," Colclasure said.

Noting the proposed sale only in passing, Colclasure said Game and Fish had been "committed to working with" the UA Division of Agriculture throughout the process.

The Division of Agriculture last year entered into a contract to to sell the 6,300 acres to a private entity, Lobo Farms LLC, for about $17.6 million, but both sides agreed in early June to cancel the deal after opposition continued to mount from lawmakers and members of the public.

The Division of Agriculture had planned to use $5 million of the sale's proceeds to match an endowment from the Arkansas Rice Research and Promotion Board for the Northeast Rice Research and Extension Center being built south of Jonesboro. Stymied so far in efforts to receive funding from the General Assembly, UA officials have yet to raise the matching funds for the center, its first since 1961.

Commissioner Rob Finley of Mountain Home said the news of the proposed sale had prompted many eastern Arkansas residents to tell him their first hunting and fishing experiences were on the Pine Tree acreage, usually with their grandfathers.

The residents, Finley said, told him "how heartbroke they were that there was a possibility it might go away" and he now hears of the "euphoria of the folks who see the long-term future for them to continue the tradition" at Pine Tree.

A Game and Fish Commission spokesman said last month it plans to issue 900 deer permits for the Pine Tree acreage this hunting season. That number was reduced to 225 last year when the Pine Tree sale was being considered.

The Division of Agriculture said it has shared some costs with Game and Fish in the joint venture of keeping the hunting and fishing grounds open to the public. Citing an example, the division said the two entities shared the $35,400 cost in 2016 of improving 1.3 miles of a gravel road to a reservoir and boat ramp.

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