Democrat Gazette
OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: Selling the state down the river?
by John Brummett | October 25, 2023 at 3:21 a.m.
Closed-door maneuvering at the rich and powerful levels to mess with the Buffalo National River has run into a mighty mite from the past.
It is a thing called a good community newspaper.
They have a dandy in Huntsville near the Buffalo River. It is the Madison County Record, with a circulation of 4,000 and a staff of five. Its publisher is Ellen Kreth, who once ran the Style section of this newspaper.
She and the Record copped a national award last year from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. It was for articles revealing a cover-up by the local school board of sexual-abuse allegations against junior-high boys basketball players.
Stories like that are more easily told from a high-rise in Manhattan than the little newspaper office down the block in a small town.
Runners-up for the prize were other small community newspapers such as The Washington Post and the Miami Herald, the latter in partnership with the online Pulitzer winner called ProPublica.
This time, the little paper broke the news a couple of weeks ago that previously quiet efforts were afoot to get the Buffalo National River re-designated a national park preserve. The idea was to draw federal infrastructure money and more visitors ... and, if someone wanted, land excavation for minerals, which is allowed under certain conditions in a national park.
The paper nosed around on a flurry of land purchases in the nearby Huntsville area. It found information connecting some of those purchases to the Walton brothers, Steuart and Tom.
From that--indirectly--came revelations of quiet high-level interest in a Buffalo River redesignation by a mostly unidentified coalition called the Runway Group including those brothers.
The idea is that Newton County and surrounding environs could become a major resort or destination, which would be good for the rich and powerful and presumably good for the locals.
More cross-country vacationers will go to a national park--touted for beauty, hiking, camping and private-enterprise services and attractions nearby--than a national river that sounds like a place to put in a canoe if that happens to be your thing. A national river in West Virginia gained more than a half-million additional visitors from such a redesignation.
U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman, whose sprawling low-population-density district extends from south Arkansas northward to parts of the Buffalo River, happens to be chairperson of a House committee on national parks and national preservation.
He was briefed by Runway Group advocates last year. He tells a reporter he chatted months ago about the idea with the governor, Sarah Sanders, who has made her husband the unofficial and unpaid czar of all Arkansas outdoors. He is a bicyclist, they say. And he has engaged in discussions with Runway.
Sometimes a national preserve's oversight can be federally delegated to a state. So ponder that little detail.
Westerman is quoted this morning in the Madison County Record--or at least I am reliably advised that he will be--as saying everyone is now in a "listening mode" on these previously private maneuverings.
That translates to "your newspaper exposed the thing and now the advocates need to put on the brakes while the locals berate us, and we try to mend fences and show them what is factual and good about the idea."
Money, that is, meaning what is good.
There seems to be some local sentiment that river and highway traffic is fine if not a little on the high side already. I am reminded of driving into Vermont from New Hampshire and coming up behind a pickup bearing a bumper sticker saying, "Welcome to Vermont. Now please leave."
There are several significant issues that would arise eventually in this matter. And that makes the first issue especially important. And that first issue is transparency.
A lack of transparency feeds low information, misinformation, fear, resentment, and anger--none of which needs much feeding these days.
So, before we get to those issues--and to the over-arching question of whether you want to preserve the Buffalo River area as it is or convert it to a more money-making operation--we need to attend to basic information.
Facts will not end low information, misinformation, fear, resentment, or anger. Some people just like those things. But facts still have currency, especially when introduced to a situation with few if any known facts.
It should be said that, while the newspaper indeed pushed out this issue, state Sen. Bryan King of Green Forest, who is emerging as quite the force for old-fashioned conservative populism--cowboy conservatism, I call it--has been sounding an alarm as well.
All of that has the makings of a fine debate. It pits the economically driven proponents against the legitimate citizen and preservationist concerns about having a rugged rural lifestyle of choice ruined because certain rich people and politicians want to make even more money, or have even more power, or enjoy a new playground, or all of the above.
Through it all, maybe the Madison County Record can cop another prize.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett feed on X, formerly Twitter.