That Second Cross-Missouri Trail

Tags

Columbia Daily Tribune, conservation, Conservation Department, Conservation Federation of Missouri, legislature, Missouri, politics, Rock Island Trail, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Nice piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this morning about the prospects for a second cross-Missouri trail.

It’s easy to see from the Post’s map that this proposed trail would have much less traffic than the Katy. It doesn’t connect or run near major population centers, as the Katy does. So a nay-sayer might complain about the cost-to-people-served ratio.

But the role of state parks is not always to serve the largest possible number. The map also tells us that this trail would give a much more Ozarks-flavored experience than the Katy; it travels through rougher and more forested territory, and thus would appeal more to the backpack-and-tent crowd than the winery-and-B&B types. So it would have fewer hikers and bikers. So what? Is popularity the only value for a park?

Park advocates (including myself, sometimes) have become habituated to using economic arguments to justify them. But the logical trap to that argument is that people who are swayed by economic arguments can always find a more profitable use for parkland. A recent op-ed in the Columbia Daily Tribune from the head of the Conservation Federation of Missouri argued against a proposed bill in the legislature that would allow nonresident landowners to obtain free hunting licenses. His criticism focused on the cost to the Conservation Department – about $500,000 – and included a list of dire consequences if that money were lost. But seriously, $500,000 in a department whose annual budget is nearing $200 million is not much of an argument. I agree that letting nonresident landowners get free hunting licenses is a bad idea, but not just because of the cost. It’s a bad idea because it perverts the original intent of the resident landowner exception, which was to make sure that farmers and other rural residents could hunt on their own property without too many government-imposed hoops to jump through. It’s a bad idea because it opens the door to abuses, with distant landowners finding off-the-books ways to profit from those free licenses. And it’s a bad idea because it’s yet another legislative run at the independence of the Conservation Department. As with the Rock Island Trail park, the value of an independent Conservation Department can’t be measured in dollars and cents. In fact, measuring the accomplishments of government in dollars and cents is the opposite of the point. Government is not supposed to act like a business, where dollar value is the highest priority. Government is supposed to act in the public interest, broadly defined, and serving the widest variety of citizens falls into that category as far as I’m concerned.

Great parks, like great schools and great highways, are valuable on their own merits, not on what they yield economically. And the proposed Rock Island Trail would be a great park.

Advertisements

More Parks

Tags

Ava, Branson, Bryant Creek, Eleven Point, Ozarks Symposium, politics, state parks

So the Missouri Governor’s Office has announced the creation of three more state parks in the Ozarks: Ozark Mountain, about a thousand acres northwest of Branson; Bryant Creek, almost three thousand acres in the deep forest southeast of Ava; and Eleven Point, more than four thousand acres in Oregon County, near Alton.

I’d heard of the Eleven Point acquisition already, and in fact I spoke about it (and the Echo Bluff State Park acquisition) at the most recent Ozark Studies Symposium. The local officials who opposed acquiring the Eleven Point land were, in my opinion, coming more from a political position than one focused on the long-term benefit for their county; as any county official in the Ozarks can tell you, parks draw tourists, and tourists spend money, with the added sales tax revenue more than making up for the lost property tax revenue. But you can bet that there will be a fresh chorus of opposition after this announcement.

Part of it will come from the timing. The announcement has an in-your-face quality to it, given that the term-limited governor will leave office next month. His successor didn’t win office based on policy proposals; his main argument for election was that he used to be a Navy SEAL. But his general tenor was of the small-government variety, and it’s hard to imagine him authorizing the aggressive acquisition of new parkland for the state.

The other part of the criticism will come from the source of the money. As the governor’s press release puts it with convenient vagueness, “Money for the purchases came from settlements reached with mining companies that had operated in the state.” More precisely, that money came from settlements that were supposed to mitigate the environmental damage caused by lead smelting operations in the southeast part of the state. Although the use of that money for these purchases is probably legal in the strictest sense, it’s stretching the definition of environmental mitigation about as far as it can be stretched to include the purchase of some scrubland north of Branson. Representatives from the Lead Belt regions will complain, and rightly so, that the money was supposed to be used in their area.

Still, it’s worth remembering that the Missouri state park system is just about the best in the country. Legislators who gripe that “we can’t take care of the ones we’ve got already” (I can hear it now) should remember that they are the ones who cause that lack of funding by their own decisions and party agendas. Although the details of this particular announcement make me sigh for the days when lawmakers from both parties would work together on a decision that was advantageous to the state overall, I have to recognize that we are not living in such times. I hope that a generation from now, people will take delight in these parks and leave the bickering over how they came into being for the footnotes of the historians.