The 90-mile Conasauga River begins in the Chattahoochee National Forest high in the Blue Ridge Mountains in northwest Georgia and flows north into Tennessee, then west, and finally south into Georgia. In Georgia, it becomes part of the larger Coosa Basin System that continues to Mobile Bay. The Conasauga River watershed is a 500,000-acre landscape that is home to 125,000 humans, and provides habitat for approximately 90 species of fish and 25 species of freshwater mussels (many of them threatened or endangered). Since the 1970s, the number of mussel species found in the river has dropped from 40 to 28. The river is also a source of water for agriculture, local communities, and a carpet-dying industry that creates 80% of the nation’s and 45% of the world’s carpets. Committed citizens and representatives from nearly 40 state and federal agencies, nonprofit conservation and research organizations, businesses, and universities have joined forces to protect the invaluable natural, cultural, economic, and recreational resources of the Conasauga River. Loosely assembled under the umbrella of the Conasauga River Alliance, the diverse partners carry out a multitude of independent and often collaborative activities in pursuit of the Alliance’s vision “to maintain a clean and beautiful Conasauga River – forever.”
In 1999, the Forest Service chose the Conasauga River watershed as one of 15 priority large watersheds. Like the Potomac Watershed Partnership, the Conasauga River Alliance is an initiative targeted at protecting one of the Forest Service-designated nationally significant watersheds. But the Alliance did not begin as a Forest Service-initiated group and, in fact, functioned for several years without the Forest Service as a partner.
The story of the Conasauga River Alliance highlights the logic and the challenges associated with large-scale watershed collaboration. Two major observations weave together the lessons of this partnership. First, this partnership highlights the challenges inherent in uniting multiple organizations with multiple and sometimes conflicting objectives under a common umbrella focused on a shared set of activities. The partners of the Conasauga River Alliance sometimes struggle to simultaneously fulfill their individual organizational goals and those of the Alliance. Second, the Conasauga River Alliance experience also highlights the importance of having a designated, skilled and respected coordinator who is able to rally and guide the diverse organizations in a partnership towards shared objectives.
From Interested Citizens to Incorporated Organization: Formation of the Partnership
Partnerships seldom arise in whole form nor do they appear overnight. Each begins from the initiative of a single individual or organization, usually focused on a particular issue or problem and in a way that engages the attention and involvement of others. The seeds for the Conasauga River Alliance were sown by an initiative taken by the Limestone Valley Resource Conservation Development Council (RC&D). In 1995, RC&D received a $200,000 grant from the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) to study the Conasauga River watershed and suggest ways that the community could work together to improve the management of the river, particularly in addressing issues such as excess sediment, excess nutrients, and toxic chemicals. A major feature of this study’s design was to engage interested citizens in Tennessee and Georgia in research about their watershed. A Steering Committee of local citizens assisted by technical advisors from private and government agriculture and conservation organizations guided the study through a series of participatory community meetings.
After the study was completed in 1996, the citizens on the Steering Committee vowed to keep working together—thus was born the Conasauga River Alliance. The Alliance adopted the study’s concluding goals as its own:
- Develop respect for natural resources and provide conservation education
- Protect private land rights
- Sustain and improve a clean Conasauga River
A Steering Committee of local citizens convened to oversee the work of the Alliance’s partner organizations, which do much of the work of the Alliance.
The Forest Service Becomes a Vital Partner
In 1999, the Forest Service selected the Conasauga River as one of the Chief’s Large-Scale Watershed Restoration Projects. The Cherokee National Forest and the Chattahoochee National Forest Supervisors, who oversee lands within the Conasauga River watershed, decided to create a position within the Forest Service to bridge the two Forests and focus on the watershed. In 1999, Kent Evans was hired as the Forest Service Conasauga River Project Coordinator, and he began his work by building a business plan for the Conasauga River Alliance, a document required of all Forest Service large-scale nationally-significant watershed restoration projects. Evans and George Ivey, TNC’s Conasauga River Project Manager at the time, wrote the plan together. They attempted to unite all of the partners’ goals into a single document, but doing so was not easy.
By 2000, there were a handful of partners in the 36-partner group who were active on a daily basis, including the US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Forest Service, Limestone Valley RC&D, USDA NRCS, The Nature Conservancy, and the Southeast Aquatic Research Institute. Other partners include Dalton State College, Dalton Utilities, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, North Georgia Regional Development Center, Tennessee Aquarium, and more. The Steering Committee (now Board of Directors) convenes every two months and hears updates from the Alliance partners on the work being conducted in the watershed. In response to the large amounts of grant money that the partners have acquired, the Steering Committee has sometimes developed special subcommittees that make project funding allocation decisions.
Initially, the Alliance had no paid staff of its own. Similarly, while the Alliance had a set of guiding goals and boundless enthusiasm when established in 1996, it had no funding to conduct Alliance-specific projects. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and RC&D helped to fill these holes by providing staff, organizational, and financial support to the partnership. RC&D hired one person on contract from TNC to help to run the Alliance and also secured a $380,000 Section 319(h) Non Point Source Pollution grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, matched in part by The Nature Conservancy. The grant funds a five-year project through 2005 designed to implement eight “corrective action” Best Management Practices (BMPs) to address high levels of fecal coliform bacteria in the Perry Creek subwatershed and 16 “demonstration” BMPs to address nonpoint source pollution from agriculture, forestry, suburban and urban runoff, habitat modification, and transportation corridors in the Conasauga River watershed. The grant also supports public conservation education and water quality monitoring programs. Shawn Clouse, TNC’s current Conasauga River Project Manager, is the field representative who conducts much of the proposed field work outlined in the EPA grant.
Eight years after its initial formation, in March 2003, the Conasauga River Alliance incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. The Conasauga River Alliance Steering Committee became the group’s Board of Directors to reflect its new organizational status. The group approved a set of bylaws, indicating the CRA Board of Directors “shall be comprised of representatives of diverse interests residing in or conducting business within the Conasauga River watershed of Georgia and Tennessee.” The bylaws also specify two new goals for the Alliance in addition to the three adopted from the NRCS-funded study:
- Work with a wide range of partners to achieve mutual goals of the Conasauga River Alliance.
- Function as a non-profit organization with high management standards regarding finances, equipment, relationships, and other assets.
One of the major reasons for incorporating as a non-profit organization was a response to the challenge of “accounting for what it takes, administratively, to run an Alliance,” noted Doug Cabe, Alliance partner and RC&D representative. While the work of the Alliance was enabled by substantial investments from key Alliance partners like RC&D, The Nature Conservancy, and the Forest Service, not having a dedicated staff of its own had been a serious challenge for the Alliance. This move allowed the partnership both to hire staff and conduct its own fundraising.
What began as an initiative of local citizens and the RC&D is today a group of 36 partner organizations—including diverse businesses, conservation groups, and federal, state, and local agencies—who work together under the guidance of the Alliance, conducting research, performing water-quality monitoring, and increasing education throughout the watershed. Before the Alliance was established, citizens were very skeptical of research being conducted in their backyards by various agencies and organizations, and they were fearful of losing control of their land. Attitudes have changed since the formation of the Alliance, comments Rick Guffey, current North Georgia Conservation Director for The Nature Conservancy: “The Alliance really started out as a watchdog-type group, and it has grown from that into a group of people that is really concerned about the river…they want to make sure that their kids have clean water from the Conasauga River in 20 or 30 years.”
Accomplishments
With such diverse and numerous partners active in the Conasauga River watershed, there are many activities ongoing at any given time and a long list of achievements of the partners of the Alliance. Doug Cabe of Limestone Valley RC&D believes that one of the biggest accomplishments of the Alliance involves education. In 2000, the Alliance held a two-day field trip organized by the Forest Service and RC&D partners. Over 550 people from Tennessee and Georgia attended and viewed best management practices (BMPs) including riparian buffers installed on private lands, streambank stabilization and restoration efforts, and waste management improvements at poultry facilities. The community members also saw healthier “reference sites” on public lands, watched kudzu control and prescribed burn demonstrations, and visited the aquatic research center and hatchery to see the juvenile mussels and rare fish being propagated to supplement existing, declining populations. Participants also toured Dalton Utilities’ water and sewage treatment plants in the town of Dalton, Georgia, home to 80,000 people and a large carpet-dying business and second to Atlanta in state water usage, using 40 million gallons of water per day.
The Alliance also held two-day training workshops for 110 teachers from Tennessee and Georgia in 2001. The group received training on Project WET (Water Education for Teachers), EPA’s water quality education program for elementary and middle school students, from a University of Tennessee professor and provided teachers with teacher’s guides and information on CD-ROM. Teachers have asked that these workshops be held annually and Alliance partners have received requests to conduct individual programs in schools. One Alliance partner comments that there is visible change in teachers’ attitudes and enthusiasm about teaching what they learned at the workshops in their classrooms.
Forest Service partner Kent Evans tells a vivid story that he believes conveys the positive influence of the Alliance’s educational activities in the watershed. He describes a camping area on the Georgia-Tennessee border in the Cherokee National Forest in the Conasauga watershed that was badly misused in the past. They were “nasty, hell-raising, beer-drinking” visitors who used to drive to the river and change their vehicles’ oil, drain the transmission and radiator fluid, and wash their cars. In the face of this number one violation site, the Forest Service mounted a clean-up and public relations campaign, installed improved campsites, and provided enforcement. The violations disappeared, not a single vehicle block to the river was removed, and nobody chain-sawed or burned any of the picnic tables. Evans attributes the positive changes to increased messages conveyed through schools, county meetings, and the Alliance’s work and Forest Service’s management.
In addition to education, many of the partners in the Alliance focus on on-the-ground conservation and restoration. Activities include installing over 30 miles of buffer along streams and rivers in the watershed, with the largest landowner installing 18 miles, through NRCS’s Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP); installing 25 stack houses, which are composting storage units for poultry litter; and helping individual property owners improve their septic systems or install alternative septic systems, like peat moss filtering. These projects are primarily conducted by one or more Alliance partner organizations in conjunction with volunteers and local landowners as needed. Alliance partners have sometimes used creative strategies to achieve their objectives. For example, in exchange for installing a riparian stream buffer on private property, an Alliance partner helped a family bring their septic system to standard so that the family could receive electricity.
There is also a strong element of research in many of the Alliance activities. USFS Southern Research Station and National Forest specialists are working together to determine appropriate vegetation communities in areas where southern pine beetles have destroyed over 10,000 acres of trees in the watershed’s National Forests. The Forest Service has set up fire research plots to study the impacts of burning and thinning on water quality. There is an ongoing road sediment study to model predicted sediment yield from roads and trails in the watershed. TNC and USFS are conducting stream toxicity analyses on National Forests and private lands asking the question, “are there toxins in the sediment?” Alliance partners are also conducting taxonomic work on rare aquatic species to identify biotic hotspots.
This site was developed by the Ecosystem Management Initiative through a partnership with the US Forest Service and the US Department of Interior. Read more.
