Shoal Creek group snags state grant

March 17, 2007 01:31 am

— By Derek Spellman
dspellman@joplinglobe.com
A local group organized to devise a watershed-management plan for lower Shoal Creek has been awarded a $30,000 state grant.
The grant, from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, constitutes the first funding that the Lower Shoal Creek Watershed Committee has received, said Craig Jones, a planner for the Harry S. Truman Coordinating Council, which secured the grant for the committee.
The funding will be used to develop a survey that, in part, will “gauge perceptions of local water-quality issues and support of various types of local programs aimed at restoring and protecting local waterways,” according to DNR.
Jones said the specific content of the survey will be devised by the committee, but it will likely use other surveys as a template and be distributed to property owners along the lower Shoal Creek watershed. Potential questions could ask those property owners how they use their land and what their perspectives are on the watershed’s future.
“We are not going to reinvent the wheel, to use an overused phrase,” he said.
The background
The Environmental Task Force of Jasper and Newton Counties last year formed the Lower Shoal Creek Watershed Committee as a steering committee. The group’s mission statement designates not just the lower part but the entire Shoal Creek watershed — from its headwaters in Barry County to its confluence with Spring River west of the Missouri-Kansas line near Riverton, Kan. — as the area to be served by the plan.
The goal of the group is to “identify and implement voluntary, common-sense actions that will help to improve and conserve the water quality” of the lower part of the creek and its tributaries.