Property Rights and Wrongs

In short order these two outfits spawned a shell organization called "Friends of the River," which festooned the watershed with paranoid and brazenly untruthful signs and "newsletters" warning that: "YOUR LAND HAS BEEN STOLEN!! Learn how our government has come like a thief in the night" and "I can't plant daffodils on my property" and "Becoming designated wild and scenic automatically makes us a National Wildlife Refuge" and "Unless we are sure we want Congress and the National Parks System [sic] to control our every move, and unless we want national conservation groups to tell us what is best for our country way of living, we best reconsider [wild and scenic designation]."

Thus disquieted and disinformed, Otis, Sandisfield and Tolland voted overwhelmingly to rescind their endorsement of wild and scenic designation, thereby rendering pointless the continued support of Becket (the fourth town). So, today only the Connecticut stretch of the West Branch of the Farmington is protected under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. (See "The Humbug Hatch," FR&R Nov/Dec 1993.)

Pumped from this successful sabotage, the property-rights crowd moved to New Hampshire where, the same year, they derailed wild and scenic designation of the Pemigewasset River--a pristine White Mountain stream that, in addition to offering exceptional wild brook trout and trophy brown trout fishing, provides most of the Atlantic salmon spawning habitat in the Merrimack River system. When The Bristol Enterprise ran a questionnaire designed by the wild and scenic study committee, members of the New Hampshire Landowners Alliance turned out in force and bought up all the copies from local stores.

Now the property-rights movement has mobilized against impending wild and scenic status for Connecticut's Eightmile River, named for the distance from the point at which it is collected by the Connecticut River to where Long Island Sound collects the Connecticut.

Along the heavily developed Eastern Seaboard the Eightmile is an anachronism. Its 150 miles of feeder streams and essentially free-flowing mainstem drain 40,000 acres of mostly unfragmented forest. The river is one of only three in the state that provide spawning and nursery habitat for Atlantic salmon. Wild brookies abound in the cold headwaters, and lower sections sustain American shad and sea-run brown trout.

In 2001, when Congress authorized the study for the Eightmile's wild and scenic status, river advocates were determined to avoid another Farmington/ Pemigewasset debacle. While land condemnation under eminent domain has never occurred on any of America's 168 wild and scenic rivers, it is not quite impossible. The act does contain a safeguard (Section 6) by which the National Park Service can rescue watershed habitat from a grossly delinquent municipality that refuses to enforce pre-existing state or federal regulations, such as the Clean Water Act's prohibition against discharge of raw sewage.

Obviously, such violations weren't going to happen in 21st Century Connecticut, especially with all five watershed communities passionately committed to wild and scenic status. So the Eightmile River Wild and Scenic Study Committee wrote specific language that negated Section 6. "We were paranoid about the Farmington problem," committee chair Tony Irving told me. "So we decided to nip any possible property-rights issue in the bud. We actually wrote into our management plan's language that the National Park Service recognizes that regulations already in place at the municipal level satisfy Section 6 and that there shall be no condemnation of private land in the Eightmile watershed. We really went the extra mile."

The bill for Eightmile wild and scenic status, sponsored by Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT) and supported by the governor and the state's entire congressional delegation, specifies in three separate places that under no circumstances will there ever be any federal land condemnation. It is not possible for rational human beings to read the bill and believe that eminent domain in the Eightmile watershed could happen.

But that category excludes property-rights zealots. It's not clear if the Property Rights Alliance called in Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio)-House Minority Leader and ranking Republican on the Natural Resources Committee--or if Boehner called in the Property Rights Alliance. But both were in full cry when the bill came to the House floor in early July 2007.

"Private property will cease to exist under H.R. 986," dissembled alliance director Christopher Butler in a letter to congressmen. "Using legislation to strong-arm land under federal control prohibits any private citizen from exercising their fundamental right to land ownership."