Protecting Rivers A Personal Crusade Shoshone County Official Makes Living Keeping River Areas Clean
FROM FOR THE RECORD (Tuesday, July 25, 2000): Correction Name incorrect: Topsoil for the Bunker Hill Superfund site will be removed from the riverside property of Shoshone County Planning Commissioner Dick Rifkind. His name was incorrect in a Saturday story.
When Kenny Hicks got there, the campers were gone, but their garbage remained. Amid the trash were a bicycle, a plastic tarp, upholstered chairs. Everything was scattered around a smoldering fire in a clearing, the entry to which was blocked by a blue car with deflated tires.
The squatters, as Hicks called them, had occupied a strip of Forest Service land along one of the region’s prettiest rivers for about five weeks.
“I wouldn’t want to run my fingers through that,” he said, nodding toward a pile of sand along a path leading to the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River. It was topped with an empty toilet paper tube.
Hicks is Shoshone County’s planning administrator. Protecting the North Fork environment, especially responding to calls like the one that brought him to the camp near Enaville, takes up half his time.
“This is the most sensitive area of the county - this and the St. Joe River corridor - and we plan to protect it,” he said. “It’s not that I feel like Joe River Cop. That’s not what I am.”
Though his one-man office lacks the ordinances to do the job properly, Hicks said, he’s making it a priority to do what he can.
Sometimes that means pulling up in his silver county pickup truck and asking politely: “What are you folks using for a toilet?”
He can file a citizen’s complaint with the sheriff’s office that might lead to a small fine for misdemeanor littering or blight. He can alert other agencies, such as the Forest Service, or talk with the Panhandle Health District. But every agency is short on money and staff to deal with the problems.
There are few hotter topics in Shoshone County than protection of the North Fork, which escaped the ravages of mining waste only to face overuse, and even abuse, by recreationists. There’s great disagreement about the extent of sewage, solid waste and visual blight - and even more over what should be done about them.
Enaville Resort owner Joe Peak is among those frustrated with the lack of progress dealing with litter, with riverbanks used as toilets, with the visual impact of RVs crowding the scenic river. But he’s encouraged by Hicks’ visits to the North Fork. Peak noted that a task force recommended that on-the-ground oversight be part of the planning administrator’s job.
“You’d be surprised the number of people who come here and say, I just spotted some guy dumping his garbage. Who do I call?” said Peak.
Hicks used to work as a structural inspector. His career got sidetracked by a 1995 liver transplant and long recuperation, during which he spent two and a half years on the Shoshone County planning commission. In that capacity he got the impression that the administrator’s biggest job was processing permits and otherwise dealing with paperwork.
When he was hired in January, he learned otherwise. Tackling land-use issues and enforcing ordinances takes the biggest bite of his time.
Last March, hundreds of people attended a planning commission meeting to demand that commissioners kill a proposed North Fork ordinance. Its most controversial feature was a $200 permit that people would need to camp on their own property. The money would have gone toward enforcement of septic rules.
Commissioners scrapped the hated ordinance.
“The democratic process worked, and I’m happy about that,” said Hicks. “What I’m not happy about is the whole ordinance was trashed, instead of working out suggested changes.”
The contentious meeting was held in a Wallace courtroom. Hicks was there again in May, this time testifying before a judge in a case the county brought against two landowners. The point of contention: the removal of 265,000 cubic yards of topsoil from fields along the North Fork. The dirt was being sold for use at the nearby Bunker Hill Superfund site.
The county contended that the removal was surface mining and was illegal under county ordinance. Hicks bird-dogged the project. He snapped pictures of the dirt-scraping and filed a complaint as soon as topsoil was taken off the property, at which point it became a commercial operation.
But a judge agreed with the landowners - one of them planning commissioner Dick Hansen - that the flood plain activity was simply an agricultural practice.
“They hung a John Deere hat on it,” Hicks said this week as he stood at the edge of the John Lambros property. Huge piles of brown earth were being shoved around by rumbling heavy equipment. Hicks shook his head and went no farther up the driveway, knowing his presence wasn’t welcome.
“Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this will just be a green field” with no harm done to the river and wetlands, he said. “But I had to do my job.”
On a drive up the river, Hicks pointed to hayfields and speculated about which would be harvested for topsoil next.
Other things caught his eye:
A neat private campground where someone recently emptied an RV septic tank on the ground, a stone’s throw from the river. The only penalty available was a littering citation. “The owner spent more money cleaning it up than there was in the fine,” Hicks said. “I do believe that it was an accident, but the point is, it’s happening.”
A county trash bin, one of several located along the Coeur d’Alene River Road this year to help keep trash off the riverbanks. At the end of a summer weekend, they’re overflowing. Local residents are using them, too, said Hicks.
A mobile home teetering on the riverbank. Its owner has shoved dirt under it. Although it’s “grandfathered in” under the flood plain ordinance, so it can stay where no new permanent structure would be allowed, Hicks wishes it would be moved before the next big flood. “That trailer’s going to go. It’ll wash down and break up when it hits the bridge.”
Former fields that now sprout recreational vehicles. They are “recreational subdivisions,” some of which were given conditional use permits with no conditions attached, Hicks said. Now, planning commissioners have serious concerns about both the visual impact on the scenic river corridor and on the parks’ ability to keep sewage and waste-water properly contained.
Landowners who want to sell little RV lots can still apply for permits, but Hicks discourages them from spending money on an application fee. “I don’t think they’ll get another (subdivision) approved, until we can get a handle on this sewage issue.”
Framed picnic shelters going into the seasonal RV parks. The lack of walls gets them through a loophole in the flood plain ordinance - one the county plans to close, Hicks said.
Discarded cars and equipment in a thicket of brush along the road. “I’m issuing (a citation) for blight,” Hicks said.
The Shoshone County commission supports Hicks’ approach, said chairman Jim Vergobbi.
“He just dove right into the fire,” Vergobbi said. “He’s dedicated. He’s doing a good job.”
Vergobbi got a firsthand view of pressures on the river last weekend. “I don’t think there was a parking spot or a turnout up the whole river that wasn’t taken. I was amazed at what I saw. The Dumpster at Bumblebee (Bridge) was heaped up and overflowing.”
So many people were tubing, Vergobbi said, that “I was looking across the creek in a couple of places and I could see water.”
As Hicks drove down the Old River Road on a quieter weekday, he passed a fisherman casting into a deep green pool and said, “It’s a beautiful river.”
Hicks, 42, said his brush with death - the hepatitis that resulted in the liver transplant - has helped him focus on what’s important in life. One of them is the river. Although he only gets paid for 35 hours a week, watchdogging the North Fork and the St. Joe has made his job full time.
“I’m not a quitter,” he said. “I’m going to rip and roar.”