[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

                                 ______


                           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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