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Jan. 20 - by Tim Zorn, Post-Tribune Staff writer.
© the Gary Post Tribune, reproduced by permission.
A federal agency still wants to create a wildlife refuge in the Kankakee River basin. It wants to restore some of the region’s former marshes and prairies to provide homes for migrating birds, endangered species and a wider variety of plants and animals. But don’t look for that to happen soon in Indiana’s part of the two-state river basin, which includes southern Lake, Porter and LaPorte counties. After five years of indifference and opposition to the refuge proposal in Indiana, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is shifting its focus to Illinois.
After this month, the Grand Kankakee Marsh National Wildlife Refuge’s office will move from Plymouth, east of Valparaiso, to Watseka, Ill. The Illinois town is "in an area where people are supportive of the refuge," Georgia Parham, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman, said. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service protects endangered species and operates more than 530 wildlife refuges, including three in southern Indiana.
In early 1997, it proposed creating a 30,000-acre Grand Kankakee Marsh National Wildlife Refuge in both Indiana and Illinois. But no land has been bought for the refuge yet, and Congress — because of opposition from an Indiana congressman — hasn’t appropriated money for it. No map showing the refuge’s proposed boundaries has been released publicly yet.
Until it finds more support in Indiana, Fish and Wildlife will concentrate its Grand Kankakee efforts in Illinois, Parham said. "They just didn’t have a whole lot of support in Indiana," said Jody Melton, director of the Kankakee River Basin Commission, an eight-county Indiana agency based in Portage serving the Kankakee River area. "They were beating their heads against a wall. The timing wasn’t right."
Jim Sweeney, a Schererville resident and refuge supporter, supports the move. "Where the office is now is kind of impractical," said Sweeney, an Izaak Walton League member. "There seems to be more support for the project in Illinois. "We’re hoping that will get the project moving."
And for the second time since 1997, the Fish and Wildlife Service is looking for a new person to head the refuge’s local office. Tim Bodeen, the project leader since August 2000, is taking a new job as director of the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Ever since the agency first aired its refuge proposal, most reactions in Indiana have ranged from guarded neutrality to outright hostility. U.S. Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Monticello, wanted the Fish and Wildlife Service to wait until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed a study — then only begun — on controlling floods in the Kankakee River basin. Farmers worried that wetlands restoration near the Kankakee River would flood nearby farm fields. And some people were convinced the refuge proposal somehow disguised an immense federal land grab. Lake County commissioners supported the project, but they were alone among county officials. The Starke County Commissioners last year passed a resolution prohibiting anyone from buying land there for the refuge.
The Fish and Wildlife Service tried to answer those concerns. It repeatedly promised it would not seize land for the refuge but would only buy property from willing sellers. It tried to reassure farmers that wetlands restoration — one of the refuge’s goals but not its only one — did not have to hurt adjacent lands. And it only wanted to re-create small pieces of the Grand Kankakee marsh, Fish and Wildlife said, not the entire half-million-acre wetland that largely disappeared after the Kankakee River was dredged.
But the agency needed to make a more positive argument for the refuge, KRBC director Melton said. Just saying it would protect wildlife and restore some of the area’s historic landscape didn’t attract local support, Melton said. "I think they need the Corps, or the state, or the KRBC, to say, 'If the refuge went in, this is the good it could do,’ " Melton said.
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