Monday, March 08, 1999
Scout dam, lake under fire
Sierra Club opposes hurting Little Miami trees, animal habitat
BY BEN L. KAUFMAN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Longtime allies have fallen out over a 13-story earthen dam and 20-acre lake proposed for the Dan Beard Scout Reservation along the Little Miami River in Clermont County.
Failure to win state and federal construction permits could spike Scout camp modernization even as pledges approach half of the $14.5 million goal.
The 80-year-old facility on Ibold Road in Miami Township covers more than 500 acres and includes historic Camps Friedlander and Craig.
If environmental battles weren't enough, the mess hall burned down last month and forced Scouts to consider accelerating construction of a 500-seat, $1.1 million dining room. The fire, however, means the old mess hall can't be recycled as a program building.
More pressing is the lake, which officials at the 12-county Dan Beard Council say is vital to 37,500 Cubs, Boy Scouts and Explorers in Southwest Ohio and Northern Kentucky.
“We have a commitment to deliver a program to kids and we just haven't done it for too long,” program director Ambler Brown said.
Supporting the plan is Little Miami Inc. (LMI), in large part because Scouts pledged to preserve more than a mile of riverbank.
“That's the area within the Scout camp that is most critical to protect,” LMI executive director Eric Partee said.
Opposing the $2.25 million dam and lake is the Miami Group of the Sierra Club. Its criticism focuses on mature trees that will be felled and wildflowers and animal habitats to be inundated on an unnamed tributary of the Little Miami.
“Our main concern is the valley,” Sierra Club spokesman Jeffrey Smith said. “It's critical green space.”
If environmentalists block the dam, they might worsen risks to the land and waterways, warned John Young, council executive director, because Scouts would move and “have to sell part of it to buy something else.”
Granted, “that's the last thing we want to do,” added Michael Kaufman, director of council fund raising, “but we have two developers interested in developing the property.”
Water quality issues arising from the proposed dam must be addressed before the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) can consider granting a construction permit. OEPA will hold a public hearing Tuesday.
Similarly, the Army Corps of Engineers is nearing a decision whether to issue its construction permit.
The Scouts' Mr. Brown acknowledged that turning the valley into a lake was “the last thing that I would choose to do,” but alternatives were worse.
In the 1960s, Dan Beard Council quit using Camp Friedlander for summer Boy Scout camping because pools and ponds were inadequate for water-based merit badge programs. Cub Scouts continued to use the facility.
Many Dan Beard Scouts have used other camps but dissatisfaction with distance, cost and programs persuaded council leaders to update their own property.
OEPA spokeswoman Lynne Barst was noncommittal but she said the overwhelming majority of letters her agency has received about the dam support the Scouts.
One critic was longtime LMI pillar Helen Black of Indian Hill. She complained that some backers “do not realize what creating the lake would entail in terms of destruction of extensive acreage of old growth forest on two steep hillsides.”
In a subsequent interview, Mrs. Black said Scouts could use nearby lakes but said she would not oppose the “Faustian bargain” negotiated by LMI's Mr. Partee.
Her ire was reserved mainly for OEPA and its preoccupation with water quality issues. “I don't think they care about ... the large, mature trees that have to be cut,” Mrs. Black said, or the habitat for woodland birds that cannot survive in more open areas.
Other writers touched similar themes:
• Canoeist Marilyn Wall, another LMI critic: “There are other alternatives for the Scouts to learn water sports, but the Little Miami Wild and Scenic River is unique.”
• Lawyer J. Dwight Poffenberger Jr.: “We have destroyed the environment enough. The Boy Scouts should enjoy the creeks and rivers as they exist.”
To overcome opposition from LMI and Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), Scouts cut deals to protect the environment. If they get the dam permits, Scouts promised:
• LMI gets the deed to more than a mile of riverbank in a strip 300 feet wide. It will give ODNR a conservation easement that bans development on those 79 acres but allow Scouts to hike and launch and land canoes.
• ODNR gets a 34-acre conservation easement along Horner Run, another Little Miami tributary, a strip about 4,450 feet long and 300 feet wide.
• To help LMI restore at least 40 acres of “critical forest lands along the Little Miami.”
• LMI gets two more parcels — 17 acres and 1 acre — for its Smysor preserve and headquarters next to the Scout property.
Mr. Smith said Scouts and ODNR could have done a land swap to avoid despoiling the valley. The Ibold Road property would be a “great semi-urban park” without a lake, Mr. Smith said, and ODNR could have given or bought land for a camp and lake that would not have damaged the environment and sent youngsters “the wrong message.”
L.H. “Mike” Fremont, a leader in the Rivers Unlimited movement, conceded that Scouts put environmentalists “in a tight spot” because development would be worse than the dam.
“The Boy Scouts should not be doing this kind of thing.”
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