D.C. lobbyist to promote river system

A group of private and public interests with ties to the Arkansas River has hired a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm to press its case before Congress and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for more federal money to pay for high-dollar improvements on the 445-mile McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System.

Members of the informal Arkansas River Coalition have been pressing the case on their own, with little success, for 20 years.

“We’ve been working with Washington, D.C., and our [U.S.] senators and congressmen for the past 20, 25 years, trying to get critical maintenance backlog, 12-foot channel and stuff that is very important for the navigation system,” said Marty Shell, who is a secondgeneration owner of Five Rivers Distribution, which operates the ports of Fort Smith and Van Buren.

“We’ve educated a lot of politicians, we’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of money going to D.C. explaining our cause and our reasons and not only what it means for our job retention but for job creation and economic development. But we just really haven’t gotten anywhere.”

Instead, the group has turned to the lobbying firm of Van Scoyoc Associates, a 25-year-old government affairs firm that boasts “a deep bench of policy experts, a network spanning Capitol Hill and the Federal agencies and the knowhow to achieve results.”

The Van Scoyoc team includes Geoff Bowman, who the firm describes as one of the nation’s leading policy professionals on water resources and infrastructure policy. He is former staff director for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s