Edmond resident, miner fight over Saline Creek erosion

KENWOOD — On a cool, clear, peaceful Thursday morning, Brad Eastman sat back on one of the many park-benchsized rocks at his gravel operation. The 101st Airborne veteran tipped back his insignia hat and looked out over the smooth waters of Saline Creek.

He was not at peace, however. The old crick in the vet’s back was acting up and he shook his head as he talked about something he sees as a giant pain in his neck.

Eastman figures he would be retired now if not for more than $1 million he has been forced to spend due to conflicts with Grand River Dam Authority a few years back and now a man who lodged a citizen’s lawsuit under federal Clean Waters Act guidelines.

In March he lost an appeal on that federal suit in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and could be stuck with a $35,000 fine, close to $400,000 in additional attorney fees for the plaintiff, plus costs to renovate the creek under the direction of the Cherokee Nation — as ordered by a judge.

“They take your life’s work away and it’s just greed is what it is. This is a small company. It’s just my wife and me, she’s 74 and I’ll be 74 in July, and one other person. Three people,” Eastman said. “That guy just wants to knock us down so he can buy us out cheap and I’m not going to let him have this land. I’ll have to be dead first. I’ll fight it to the end.”

“That guy” is David Benham, who grew up along the creek just upstream from the gravel mine and often visits his 83-year-old mother who still lives in the house where he was raised — an idyllic Eastern Oklahoma home setting with an immaculate yard among tall, mature trees, complete with beds of Sweet William, guinea fowl chasing bugs, and a gazebo right next to the creek, just below a rocky waterfall.

But the creek is eroding and widening, and might just take out the driveway to the home next time it floods.

“It’s nothing like it was here when I was a kid,” Benham said.

The Cherokee Nation member, Edmond resident and owner of Night Trips gentlemen’s clubs among many other properties, took an interest in the creek as he noticed increased erosion along its course, dirty water and loss of habitat.

The lower creek has been especially affected by removal of wetlands and gravel from the creek where it flows into Hudson Lake near the GRDA Pump Back, a few miles south of Salina. But the mine operation’s impact extends well upstream in the popular little creek, Benham said.

Benham has indeed been buying parcels of land along the creek and now owns about a mile of creek-side property as part of what he says is an attempt to mitigate a range of issues facing the once-pristine, clearwater stream, from habitat loss upstream to the gravel operation downstream.

Driving the winding roads of Mayes and Delaware counties last week he stopped on a bridge where he and friends used to jump off into the creek when he was a kid. He pointed out the area upstream, where the creek still is narrow and shaded by overhanging trees.

“That’s how it used to look all the way along through here,” he said. “I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, exactly, maybe with some federal funding match or something, but I want to replace that riparian zone at least on the property I have and maybe talk some other people into trying to save this creek, too.”

Instead of a creek winding through wooded, rocky slopes, in places now it is a clear-water trickle running over wide expanses of barren rock. When it rains the creek rises quickly and rips away more soil from its banks, leaves broad gravel bars, exposes tree roots and knocks down tree after tree.

“People still come here and say it’s beautiful, and it is, it really is, but they don’t know what it’s really supposed to look like,” he said.

“The creek is shallower, it’s warmer, there’s no shade or vegetation, so that changes everything for the wildlife and the fish,” he said. “We used to come down here and catch crawdads and fish and all of that is gone now.”

Benham and a team of experts convinced federal courts that much of the problem started with the mine Eastman purchased in 1991.

“It was here in the 1960s so it predates me,” Eastman said.

That’s when the main mining operation was on Grand River Dam Authority land where huge pipes suck water uphill from Hudson Lake to Chimney Rock Lake, where it is used to create additional hydropower.

One of the first jobs for Eastman was dredging away gravel that used to foul those pipes, he said.

The contract was terminated and Eastman used his 600-plus acre Bureau of Mines permit to move his operation upstream, which was a costly move. He said he believed leadership at GRDA “had it in for me.”

John Wiscaver, executive vice president of corporate and strategic communications for GRDA, said he looked back at documents and the required move appeared to be a contractual matter.

“We determined he was conducting some activities outside the contract, that he breached the contract that we had agreed to, and we terminated that contract,” he said.

Now Eastman stands to lose the gravel mining operation, which has provided rock for Tulsa’s landfills, local highway projects and roofs for many local schools, he said.

“You can’t get this kind of rock just anywhere,” he said.

Eastman accuses Benham of a land grab and said the real estate investor even offered to buy the mine lands “for peanuts.”

Benham said the mine simply never should have been allowed in that location in the first place and regulatory agencies have done Eastman’s Ozark Materials no favors by allowing it.

“I don’t have anything against (Eastman). I’m sure they are good people. This isn’t personal,” he said. “I’m just trying to save this creek.”

Benham said buyout offers were indeed forwarded as a part of early attempts to avoid litigation but he still might offer what he can if Eastman wants out.

“I would cover the reclamation and waive my attorney fees if he agreed to turn over the land to someone like the Nature Conservancy for a preserve, something like that. I really don’t want his land I just want the mining stopped. I’m serious about that offer,” Benham said. “I don’t want to harm anybody.”

With the gravel operation removing wetlands, creating a road in the stream bed and hollowing out an area where a rocky swimming hole used to be that was similar to the still-popular Blue Hole Park a couple miles upstream, the creek flow now rushes down to fill that void and pulls more and more material with it, Benham and hydrology experts successfully argued in court.

Likewise the protective wetlands, sand and rock are no longer there to hold back Hudson Lake, which encroaches farther and farther upstream.

“Something needed to be done and the state and federal agencies were not doing anything,” Benham said.

He filed suit as a citizen, along with Indian and Environmental Law Group of Tulsa, and has put up about $400,000 in attorney fees and court costs, he said.

“I just want to save this stream before it’s gone,” he said.

Eastman likewise said he is no enemy of the environment and that he has always operated as instructed by the Bureau of Mines and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“We have always played by the rules. We have done nothing wrong,” he said.