[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 53 (Thursday, May 5, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: May 5, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
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HON. LARRY LaROCCO
of idaho
in the house of representatives
Thursday, May 5, 1994
Mr. LaROCCO. Mr. Speaker, the April 22 edition of the Wall Street
Journal carried a front page article entitled ``The River That Runs
Through Boise Runs Clear Once Again.'' The article recounts the
remarkable combination of local, State, and Federal efforts to restore
the Boise River which runs through Boise. I submit the article for the
Record.
[From the Wall Street Journal, Apr. 22, 1994]
The River That Runs Through Boise Runs Clear Once Again--Cleanup Buoys
Environment, Stirs the Local Economy And Lures Birds, Bathers
(By Timothy Noah)
Boise, ID--The Boise is a river transformed, Mallards
paddle its clear water. Magpies and bald eagles, once a rare
sight here, nest in the cottonwoods along its shores, drawn
by the river's growing stock of trout. And the populace
flocks to navigate it by inner tube and canoe. New low-rise
office buildings and luxury homes crowd the river's shores.
It wasn't always so. While downtown Boise huddled in the
foothills of the Rockies, the river below was abandoned to
rats scuttling along its banks and to auto bodies and sewage
clogging its flow. The refuse from riverside slaughterhouses
sometimes made it run red with blood.
But spurred by citizen revulsion--and by federal
regulations and tens of millions of dollars of government
money--the city ended the dumping, polluters left, and the
water was cleaned up. The payoff isn't only a cleaner
environment, but increased economic activity as well.
rolling along
Boise's experience reflects the historic and generally
unremarked cleanup of urban rivers that has occurred since
the first Earth Day, 24 years ago today, helped raise the
nation's environment consciousness. Many of the filthiest
rivers, from Boston's Charles to the American in Sacramento,
Calif., have been substantially cleansed. Once-shunned
riverbanks, such as those along the Willamette in Portland,
Ore., and the Merrimack in Nashua, N.H., have turned into
picturesque gathering places that boost civic pride and real-
estate values.
Environmentalists have been slow to praise this progress
for fear of slackening cleanup efforts. And industry, hoping
to stave off further environmental regulation, has been
hesitant to acknowledge that this cleanup has been a major
spur to economic development.
There still are rivers to be cleaned. But as Congress
prepares to rewrite the Clean Water Act of 1972, the main
challenge will be finding ways to control rural water
pollution that is primarily the result of pesticides and
fertilizer washing off farmland. According to an
Environmental Protection Agency report issued this week,
agriculture accounted for 72% of all pollution in
``impaired'' rivers. A working assumption of both lawmakers
and the White House is that the crisis in America's urban
rivers has now largely abated.
One of those success stories flows through Idaho's capital,
which got its name from the river that first attracted
settlers to the area. French fur trappers, marveling at the
rich flood plain between mountain and desert, named it la
riviere boisee, or the wooded river.
common scents
But Boise developed mainly as a supply center to miners in
nearby Idaho City after gold was found there in 1863. By the
early 20th century, the Boise River was a floating dump. On
its banks stood sawmills and, later, slaughterhouses. A woman
who grew up in turn-of-the-century Boise once recalled the
river smells of her childhood: dead fish, rotten bark and
refuse.
``It really was the classic example of an urban river used
primarily for waste removal,'' say Kevin Coyle, president of
the American Rivers environmental group.
By 1962, Idaho's health department had collected enough
data about ``sludge'' and ``floating grease'' to sound an
alarm. State officials concluded that bacteria from raw
sewage would ``present a definite health hazard to anyone who
comes in contact with this water.'' Norway rats feeding on
animal parts from a meatpacking plant, the report said, were
``potential disease carriers.''
Growing citizen disgust prompted city officials to seek
ways to clean the river. Momentum accelerated when Harold
Atkinson, a California planning consultant hired by the city,
noticed that Boise owned several parcels of riverfront land.
Why not create contiguous parkland? The city council adopted
his suggestion in 1966.
The Greenbelt, as it is now formally known, sparked a local
effort to clean up the river. Boy Scouts put chicken wire
around freshly planted cottonwood trees to keep beavers from
chewing them to bits. Moonlighting federal officials helped
identify the varieties of wildlife and folks built shelters
in trees for ducks to nest in.
The other big impetus came from Washington. Congress
increased funding for cleanup of rivers and other waterways
through a series of laws that culminated in the Clean Water
Act. That law required all pipeline dischargers, such as
sewage systems and industrial plants, to meet cleanup
standards defined by the best available technology.
Although the 1972 law has clearly failed to meet some of
its loftier goals, among them an end to all discharge of
water pollutants by 1985, its impact on end-of-the-pipe
dumping has as been striking. Industrial pollution remains a
reality, but is steadily declining as industries improve
pretreatment and shift to processes that create less
pollution. Older urban sewers hooked up to storm-water drains
still back up into river and streams during heavy rains, but
deliberate dumping of raw sewage is no longer a daily fact of
urban life. Less than half of U.S. citizens sent their sewage
to a treatment plant in 1970; today, an overwhelming majority
do.
In Boise, the clean-water law allowed the city to crack
down on households that were still piping sewage directly
into the river and to build a second and third sewage-
treatment plant. According to Lynn McKee, EPA assistant
regional administrator for Idaho, the agency has provided $30
million to Boise for sewage upgrade during the past two
decades, much of that has been matched by additional state
and local funding.
The clean-water law also chased the slaughterhouses out of
the city, says Michael McIntyre, a state water-quality
compliance officer. Others improved their waste-treatment
processes. And after the EPA required a nearby dam to improve
water flow control to dilute pollution, residents ended their
practice of damming the river with rusting cars, while the
city set about fishing them out.
As the water grew cleaner, something else occurred: The
Boise River became an attraction. ``Trash'' fish like suckers
and carp gave way to trout and whitefish, luring anglers and
eagles.
The river became so swimmable that thousands of people now
traverse it by inner tube or canoe during summer. The cleanup
even spawned an annual Boise River Festival that last year
drew an estimated half-million people.
Another benefit of the cleanup: Development of Boise's
downtown began a march toward the river. Boise-based
companies such as Albertson's Inc. supermarket chain and Ore-
Ida Foods Co., H.J. Heinz Co.'s frozen food unit, shifted
their headquarters to the riverfront. Morrison Knudsen Corp.,
the construction company, funded a state-run nature center
along the city's stretch of riverside parkland, and Ore-Ida
donated land for a riverfront amphitheater where Shakespeare
is performed in summer months.
Perhaps the grandest symbol of the river's heightened
status is the Arid Club, a private organization that includes
350 members of Boise's business elite. In the mid-1980s, the
club moved to a new building on the edge of the Greenbelt so
diners might gaze out at the rolling water.
Another stretch of riverfront east of downtown is now among
Boise's most exclusive enclaves, with sylvan subdivisions
named Spring Meadow and River Run. Hoboes pitched shanties
here during the Depression; today its inhabitants include
corporate leaders and city officials.
Indeed, the area is in such demand that developer Peter
O'Neill has been criticized for limiting access to roller
skaters, bikers and even folks wanting to stroll along its
paths. ``There is a school of thought that the rich people
living along the river are excluding everybody else,'' he
says. But if you provide too much public access, ``you're
going to destroy the very thing you're trying to create.''
Boise officials say they can't quantify the full economic
gain of the river's revival, but clearly ``there's value that
is gained from having an attractive river,'' says David
Eberle, a visiting professor at Boise State University. He
says the river festival alone has generated as much as $20
million in lodging, souvenirs, food purchases and other
expenses. In a study of the local real-estate market, he
found that the average house and lot along the Greenbelt
sells for $60,000 more than an equivalent house away from the
river.
In contrast to business's warnings of economic doom from
cleanup requirements, today the Boise Chamber of Commerce
boasts about the river as an incentive to get companies to
move to the area. ``Over time,'' says chamber president Jay
Clemens, ``the cleanup of the river certainly had the impact
of being a stimulus to the economy in our community.''
While some economic activity has merely been shifted from
one part of town to another, the new riverfront has greatly
added to Boise's appeal. Overall, the city is growing at a
rapid clip, with a population of 140,000--twice what it was
in 1960.
After decades of neglecting the river, many Boiseans now
worry whether they will no love it to death. With the river's
cleanup now largely complete, says Hugh Harper, a retired
wildlife official, ``our big fight is keeping the cotton-
picking developers out of it.''
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