By Wally Kennedy

wkennedy@joplinglobe.com

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — It was a night of trading figurative punches.

Residents in the of Little Flat Creek in Barry County were in no mood Thursday night to listen to the positions of representatives of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources in connection with the department’s handling of a proposal to exempt a stretch of the stream from bacterial regulation because it is shallow.

Conversely, a representative of the department, Rob Morrison, with the water-protection program, was in no mood to hear pointed questions from Little Flat Creek property-owners who said they could not understand why the department would even consider such an exemption.

At one point during the meeting at the DNR’s regional office in Springfield, voices were raised, fingers were pointed and accusations were made.

Morrison accused Tracie Snodgrass, who lives along the creek, of being “disrespectful and mocking’’ to a department employee, John Hoke, who is overseeing the department’s program to exempt approximately 90 streams in the state from bacteria regulation. Final consideration on the plan most likely will be made before the year is out, but no decision is imminent.

When Snodgrass asked Hoke to explain comments he had made, Morrison said he would not tolerate treatment of a DNR employee in that fashion. But some who attended the meeting came to her defense. They said Snodgrass was “talked down to’’ by Morrison in a disrespectful manner for seeking answers to questions the department did not want to answer for fear of looking incompetent.

Others among the 15 or so people who attended the meeting then jumped in to accuse the department of doing nothing to rein in the water-pollution threat posed by confined-animal-feeding operations (CAFOs), noting that Barry County has more CAFOs than virtually any county in the state.

Morrison defended the operators of the CAFOs, saying those with complaints about individual operators should report them to the regional office in Springfield. Some residents of Barton County, where hog CAFOs are expanding, said they had filed complaints but had not received any response to those complaints from the regional office.

One Barton County resident, Darvin Bentlage, accused the department of collusion by protecting a CAFO operator from enforcement action for violating water-quality rules. He said he filed a complaint against a CAFO operator for an illegal discharge from a waste-water lagoon. Shortly after filing the complaint, an employee of the CAFO stopped the discharge and tilled the soil around the lagoon to hide the evidence of the activity. There was no enforcement action, he said.

Morrison said that workers in the regional office in Springfield would not do such a thing. Bentlage said he had taken photographs of the lagoon discharge and the tilled soil. He said the evidence speaks for itself.

The department was criticized for its handling of the notification of residents along Little Flat Creek. Snodgrass and others said they would not have known anything about the department’s plan to delist a two-mile stretch of the creek from bacterial protection had she not received a letter from the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, based in St. Louis.

Residents said the DNR, in its survey of Little Flat Creek, relied almost exclusively on stream depth to determine whether the stream can support swimming and other recreation. If the stream isn’t deep enough at the sites sampled, the state assumes a person can’t swim in the stream and exempts it from protections normally required for swimming and other whole body contact recreation.

“Nobody with the department ever contacted us,” Snodgrass said. “No interviews with property owners were conducted. If you don’t do that, how do you know how we use that stream?’’