WAYNE & PIKE COUNTIES, PA — The Lackawaxen River Conservancy (LRC), a group of local residents dedicated to protecting, preserving and improving the river, want to gather local support for a proposal that would designate the Lackawaxen as a Partnership Wild and Scenic River. 

The conservancy came to the Upper Delaware Council (UDC), a partnership of federal, state and local governments that cooperatively manages the Upper Delaware River, seeking a letter of support. It left empty-handed. 

Members of the UDC agreed that the proposal was not far enough along to issue a letter of support. The roughly 30 locals who attended the meeting were not convinced that the designation would benefit the river or them as landowners. 

“I don’t want the feds there,” said one resident, who declined to give her name, speaking with the River Reporter. If it gets designated, it would go to the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, she claimed. “And then you have no control on [your] own property.”

What is the proposal?

The National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, created by the U.S. Congress in 1968, preserves rivers with “outstanding natural, cultural and recreational values in a free-flowing condition,” according to a National Park Service (NPS) primer. Christine Foland, a member of the conservancy, said the conservancy believes the Lackawaxen River is free-flowing and has many outstanding values to preserve. 

A study committee made up of Lackawaxen River locals would create a River Management Plan, a planning document that lists ways to protect and manage the river. A council of local voices would be established to implement the River Management Plan. 

Besides the protective benefits of the River Management Plan itself, the designation would include technical assistance from the NPS and protection from federal or local projects that could adversely affect the river, said Foland. 

“Above all, it is a cooperative venture which is in local hands,” she said. 

What isn’t the proposal?

The UDC, which heard the LRC proposal, has plenty of experience with the Wild and Scenic Rivers program—the council is itself the local management piece of the Upper Delaware’s participation in that program. However, there are significant differences between what occurred in the Upper Delaware and what is being proposed for the Lackawaxen River. 

In 1978, Congress designated a portion of the Delaware River from Hancock to Westfall as the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River. The acts of Congress added it to the Wild and Scenic Rivers system, but also made it a unit of the national park system. 

The NPS owns 30.4 acres of land in the river corridor, according to an overview published by the NPS. The rest of the land, primarily in private hands, is managed through a partnership between the NPS, the states of New York and Pennsylvania, the Delaware River Basin Commission, and the towns and townships which border the river on both sides. 

That first-of-its-kind partnership was proposed as an experiment whether an environmentally significant resource could be managed as a cooperation with local government, and included a stipulation that little land would be acquired by the NPS. 

The Lackawaxen River would not operate under that same structure if added to the Wild and Scenic Rivers system. Rather than being designated as a unit of the national park system, and having the NPS presence which comes along with such a designation, it would be managed entirely by a council of local representatives. The NPS could offer support, but it could not own land along the river. 

The new “partnership” model, which would apply to the Lackawaxen River, came out of the lessons learned from the Upper Delaware, according to NPS Superintendent Lindsey Kurnath. 

“The difficulties of establishing the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River led the park service to decide to set up an entirely different model and program called the partnership river program,” said Kurnath.  

“No one is trying to repeat all of the conflict that this 40-year relationship has led to,” she added. 

How are locals getting involved?

The proposal has a long way to go before it can become a reality. Getting a Wild and Scenic Rivers designation involves many years of study and work, as well as several acts of Congress. 

The first step for the conservancy is to establish local support, so that they could show the area’s federal representatives that they should move forward with the project. 

Residents of the river are concerned that their voices aren’t being heard in that process. 

“The conservancy went to the UDC without talking to river locals,” the un-named resident told the River Reporter. “You haven’t interviewed a single property owner or township supervisor as far, you know, as to what they thought. They came to the feds first,” she said. 

Foland, from the LRC, said the conservancy is approaching other local conservation groups first, including the UDC. “These are things that are in our future,” she said, after being asked whether the conservancy had run the idea by local boards of supervisors. 

However, the UDC chose not to issue a letter of support, with members saying the proposal needed to go to local governments before they could make a determination on it.