Activists seek to protect Gallatin River

BIG SKY, Mont. – As sport utility vehicles zoom past on the nearby highway, Jason Gras adjusts his helmet, gazing at the Gallatin River. After seven years of kayaking this river, he said, he’s started wearing nose plugs. He’s afraid the water just isn’t as clean as it used to be.

“You never used to wear nose plugs and things, and you can just tell, it seems more polluted,” Gras said.

Like many of his neighbors, the Big Sky native fears that continued development in this southwestern Montana resort town threatens the water quality in the Gallatin, one of Montana’s most popular blue-ribbon trout streams.

For more than two years, residents here have been pushing to get a special designation for the river – one that would prohibit future “point-source” pollution that would permanently degrade the water, such as the dumping of wastewater from housing developments around the destination ski and summer resort.

In 2001, more than 2,000 area residents signed a petition asking for the “Outstanding Resource Water” designation for the river from where it leaves Yellowstone National Park to its confluence with Spanish Creek north of Big Sky.

Their efforts, however, have not been supported by everyone around Big Sky, especially real estate and development leaders. They say the tougher restrictions are not necessary to protect the river and only serve to stymie legitimate development in the community.

“If a community grew, for example, and they needed to expand water treatment or discharge, they couldn’t do it with an ORW designation,” said Peggy Trenk of the Montana Association of Realtors. “You’ve got to think about not just what exists today but what you may be putting in place for the future.”

Don Allen, director of the Western Environmental Trade Association, said he thinks the designation was intended for more remote rivers.

“No one’s opposed to the Gallatin being a blue-ribbon pristine stream,” he said. “We don’t think it’s necessary to make it an ORW to maintain the high quality that it has.”

For the special designation to move forward, the state Department of Environmental Quality still needs to complete an extensive environmental study, estimated to cost at least $200,000. The special desigation for the Gallatin also would eventually need the approval of the state Legislature.

DEQ Director Jan Sensibaugh said she put in a request to the 2003 Legislature for the money, but the request was denied.

Many supporters of the designation say the state should have required a developer to pay for the study as part of a settlement over allegations that he polluted tributaries of the Gallatin during a construction project.

State regulators originally proposed fines of more than $1.3 million against Tim Blixseth and his exclusive, multimillion-dollar Yellowstone Mountain Club development. But in a $231,000 settlement, the DEQ allowed Blixseth to spend $155,000 on a special glass recycling project instead. The remainder of the money went to the state general fund.

The DEQ defended its settlement with Blixseth last week, but it acknowledged it had deviated from Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, which say such an offsetting project “must have an adequate nexus, or connection, to the underlying violation.”

“They did have evidence that stream habitat was destroyed, that fish were dead,” said Rob Ament, director of American Wildlands, a conservation group in Bozeman that is leading efforts to get the special designation for the river. “That’s what this is all about. And you would think if you settled, the money should be spent back in the basin where the damage occurred.”

Blixseth did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment. Company attorney Steve Brown said the club chose the glass-recycling project because it had immediate, statewide environmental impact.

The DEQ also acknowledged deviating from the EPA guidelines by not taking public comment on the project.

State Rep. Chris Harris, D-Bozeman, chairman of the state Environmental Quality Council’s Agency Oversight Committee, said given the chance, the public would have supported the environmental review for the Gallatin.

At Fred Weschenfelder’s Castle Rock Inn, a smattering of cabins and campsites on the Gallatin, Weschenfelder said the state is allowing water quality in the Gallatin to degrade.

“There’s these other things that are really beginning to show,” he said. “If we’d start correcting them now, we wouldn’t have to go through the whole thing to get it back where it was.”

Just down the road is the Rock Creek Baptist Camp, where angler Norman Cherry has volunteered for 11 years. Cherry looks down river, to massive rock walls towering over the water, and doesn’t see the same problem as his neighbor.

“The fish, as far as I can tell, are doing well,” he said. “There’s got to be a balance between the government’s protection policy and the homeowner’s right to use the land, and I think that balance is right as it is.”

Gras, about to put his kayak into the river, said he believes the development in the area disregards the aesthetics of Montana.

“That’s why people come here: Everything still is a virgin resource,” he said. “I think some people miss the point.”