Taming a river
Ilove watching barges move up and down the Arkansas River. I did just that on a recent Sunday afternoon while sitting in the plush offices of the Little Rock Port Authority. The occasion was a meeting of the Pulaski County Historical Society. I listened to the program, which concerned the history of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, while watching the river flow south toward the Mighty Mississippi.
It has long been speculated that Harvey Couch, the influential founder of Arkansas Power & Light Co., used U.S. Sen. Joe T. Robinson from Arkansas to ensure that President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a Tennessee Valley Authority rather than an Arkansas River Valley Authority. As a supplier of electricity, Couch didn’t want taxpayer-subsidized competition.
What Arkansas wound up getting years later, though, was almost the equivalent of TVA. The navigation system helped pull rural areas out of poverty. A state that lost more population per capita than any other state in the country from 1940-60 has now been gaining population since the 1960s.
It was the most expensive civil works project in the history of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at the time of completion. The price tag was $1.3 billion.
Since 1970, when the first commercial tow to navigate the entire channel arrived at Catoosa in Oklahoma, the lower 400 miles of the Arkansas River has been controlled. It’s fit for navigation and less prone to flooding. There’s less silt in its water. There are recreational opportunities that never existed before. Hydroelectric power is produced.
Sen. John L. McClellan of Arkansas, who chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee late in his career, claimed in a 1962 speech: “Nothing the federal government has ever done or could ever do will be as big a boon to our state as this.”
In a 1995 history of the system’s first 25 years that was commissioned by the Corps, Arkansas historian Charles Bolton wrote: “In 1968, McClellan believed that the Arkansas waterway under construction would bring much larger returns than those suggested by a benefits-to-cost analysis of 1.5 to 1. Speaking at the David D. Terry Lock and Dam, McClellan argued that the waterway would make the Arkansas River Valley ‘the valley of promise, progress and prosperity.’
“President Richard Nixon also took a broad view of the waterway’s promise, stating in his dedication speech at Tulsa that the system would make ‘this region a magnet for people seeking the good life.’”
Arkansas native Roy Reed wrote a story on the system in 1977 for The New York Times. Reed noted that water in the river “if not quite blue, is a most appealing clear green instead of the muddy brown it once was.” He said the system had indeed brought most of the benefits McClellan had long predicted. Reed said the system “induced industry to build plants in the Arkansas Valley, industry that provides thousands of jobs for country and smalltown people who no longer rely on the land for a living.” He also noted that the once dangerous river was now a recreational magnet with 39 parks along its banks and 21 more under construction.
The newspaper story stated that a river that once contained large amounts of “sewage, chicken entrails and industrial waste” had become “the best fishing water in state.”
“Just as recreational benefits have a broad effect on the economy, so do the benefits of navigation,” Bolton wrote. “The waterway reduces transportation costs, which lowers the sales price of commodities shipped by water; the lowered price then creates a larger market, and the growth of the market stimulates more production, employment and income.”
A University of Oklahoma study found that between 1974 and 1978, the system lowered transportation costs by $38 million a year.
“Studies dealing with recreation and navigation are important because they suggest that the McClellan-Kerr system has had an impact on the economic health of Arkansas that goes beyond the benefits predicted by its planners,” Bolton wrote. “The lives of Arkansans have been improved by the recreational facilities provided by the waterway; and as they enjoyed themselves, people also spent money that had positive benefits for the economy.
“Less commerce moved on the Arkansas River than planners had predicted, but the tonnage that was carried seems to have had a bigger impact than was anticipated. Waterborne transportation, flood protection, hydroelectric power, recreational facilities, fish and wildlife habitat and usable water are the major products of the system. In addition, the waterway has created jobs and encouraged economic growth.”
The system, however, is showing its age as 2023 dawns. The six members of Arkansas’ congressional delegation will have to work hard in the years ahead to ensure the system receives its fair share of federal infrastructure spending.
Meanwhile, those members of Congress will need to remind the Corps to quit ignoring the recreational aspects of the system. Too many of the parks that once were such a point of pride have never been modernized. Several have closed.
“The waterway was a boon—a gift, favor or blessing—to Arkansas because of its potential to improve the economy of the state and the lives of its citizens,” Bolton wrote. “My own belief is that Senator McClellan was right. The civil works project named for him and Sen. Robert S. Kerr of Oklahoma has made, and continues to make, an important contribution to this state.”