Missourians ‘Show Us’ How to Protect Habitat
One-eighth cent ‘conservation tax’ is the envy of the nation

By Joel M. Vance

It is the gray light before dawn, that half-hour between legal shooting and the tip of the sun over the river to the east.  There is a sudden rush overhead, as if a great bird of prey had stooped to my decoys. But it’s not one bird, it’s a flock of teal doing what teal do—appear from nowhere in a huge hurry.

They pull out of their swoop in front of the decoys, wheel and are motionless in the turn, then they’re incoming.  When I stand they reach for altitude and again are motionless for that instant before they overcome gravity.  I shoot and one falls.  I swing on a second bird too hastily and shoot behind it and then they are gone.

This is my duck hole, shared with son Andy and a couple friends.  No one else ever appears here and that’s fine with me, although it’s on public land within sight of a gravel road that sees considerable traffic.

The two-acre wetland, never more than chest deep, likely wouldn’t exist except that Missourians have taxed themselves for 30 years to buy bulldozers to scoop out shallow wetlands on public wildlife areas.

That’s not all the one-eighth cent sales tax has done for the Missouri outdoors, not by a long way.  But it’s one that I appreciate as much if not more than many of the other projects the more than the $90 million-a-year tax provides.

Missouri’s sales tax for conservation is unique in the country.  In 1976 voters approved a Constitutional amendment to tax themselves a penny on every eight dollars of purchase with the money dedicated to fish, wildlife and forestry, administered by the Department of Conservation.  No other state has done anything similar.

A number of states have passed or proposed tax incentives for conservation practices, but those realize only a drop in the bucket to what’s needed and only one has anything approaching the Missouri tax.  Arkansas has a one-eighth cent sales tax for conservation, but only 45 percent of it goes to the Game and Fish Commission.  The rest goes to other agencies, including state parks—and Missouri has a separate one-tenth cent sales tax split between state parks and soil and water conservation.

Dan Zekor, federal aid coordinator for the Missouri Department, says, “I’ve been contacted by Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa. It's too tough without significant grassroots support and a unified front of ALL conservationists.  Even Arkansas had to put several different but similar eggs in the basket to make it work.”

The Show-Me State citizens pulled off this legislative end-around by initiative petition and a referendum vote, a bypass of the elected representatives available to only about half the states.  Those who don’t have initiative/referendum must rely on their legislature to get a dedicated source of funds and legislatures are notoriously reluctant to approve money they can’t control.

The Missouri tax opened up a conservation program that already was considered among the top few nationally.  Now it is the envy of every other state wildlife agency.  None have a protected budget and regulatory autonomy even close to that of the Missouri department.

While the Missouri conservation program is broad-based, across fish, wildlife and forestry (that has been the constitutional mandate of the Conservation Department since citizens first established a non-political department through initiative in 1936), wetlands have been a major beneficiary.  Wetlands take a bunch of managing.  You can buy land and walk away from it and deer and turkeys will proliferate, but it takes intensive care to encourage migratory waterfowl.

Missouri lays in that uneasy geographic belt between the marsh lands of the Lake States and the marshlands of the south.  Waterfowl hunting success depends on weather, but also on available habitat, and aside from farm ponds and larger lakes, wetland habitat mostly has been created over the past half century.

A sudden cold front can move many ducks south and if a warm front is stalled over Missouri, hunting becomes blessed.  But if the cold shoulders into Missouri it can freeze shallow water and send ducks Dixie-ward.

By the 1960s when conservation had became a formidable science, Missouri’s historic wetlands almost all had been drained for agriculture and what pioneers described as “flocks that darkened the sky” were only mentions in history books.

The Department’s wetland program now is more than half a century old.  Fountain Grove Conservation Area, a few miles northwest of the Swan Lake National Wildlife Refuge, dates to the 1940s.  At more than 7,000 acres it is a restoration of part of the historic Grand River floodplain (the Grand historically attracted so many ducks that they carpeted the water until you couldn’t see anything but duck).

That was then, but by the 1950s Missouri had lost more than 87 percent of its historic wetlands.  The entire Bootheel, once a vast swamp of baldcypress to rival anything in the Dixie swamps, has been drained to tiny remnants.  Today 6,234-acre Duck Creek Conservation Area is the premier southeast Missouri duck magnet, along with nearby Mingo National Wildlife Refuge.  Duck Creek dates to 1950 and is due up for renovation, as are three other aging wetland areas: Schell-Osage and Montrose in western Missouri and Ted Shanks on the Mississippi River.

While those areas occurred before the conservation tax, it’s doubtful that they could have been well maintained, expanded or done justice to without the additional money from the 1976 tax which now provides more than 60 percent of the Department’s annual budget.

The Missouri campaign for more wildlife money began after a year-long study by three outside experts: Starker Leopold, son of famed conservationist Aldo Leopold; Charles Fox, a water resources expert from Wisconsin, and Charley Callison, then executive secretary of the Audubon Society and a native Missourian.

They concluded that the Department had an admirable program, but that it wasn’t doing much for the 70 percent of the population who don’t hunt or fish, but who enjoy the outdoors—often on hunter/angler paid-for land.  And, for that matter, existing programs were pinched.  New money or stagnation—those were the choices.

Missouri, like almost all states, got the bulk of its money from permit sales, plus some federal tax money through the Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson excise taxes on outdoor sports equipment.  And you can raise permit fees only so far before it becomes a losing proposition-- hunters and anglers simply quit because of the cost.  It also isn’t fair to make them pay the freight for everyone who uses areas bought with their money.

The campaign for more conservation money became a lesson in persistence.  It actually began in 1969 with an initiative petition which proposed to levy a one-cent tax on a bottle of soda.  That would have brought in an estimated $20 million annually, which was the original target.

But the petition backers made two big mistakes, one fatal.  The first was to overlook opposition from Seven Up which has its world headquarters in St. Louis and pledged big money to defeat the proposed tax; the second was to omit the words “Be it hereby enacted…” from the petition which caused the state Supreme Court to invalidate it, despite it having the most signatures ever on an initiative.

It could have been a death knell, but the backers, who were led by the Conservation Federation of Missouri, a consortium of citizen conservation groups and individuals, looked for a more agreeable funding source, and a lawyer who knew how to draw a valid petition.  The result was the one-eighth percent sales tax, and an added 90 million dollars, rather than 20.

I was involved from the beginning.  The Leopold Study was in the middle of its year when I began working for the department in 1969 and literally the first day my boss told me I’d be part of a bold effort to expand the department’s programs.  Some of the best minds in conservation came up with a program we called “Design for Conservation” for which I wrote the words.

It proposed to add 400,000 acres to the less than four percent of the state’s acreage in public ownership, as well as new programs including expanded outdoor education, a natural history and endangered species section and a system of nature centers across the state.  All of that and more has happened in the last 30 years.  There have been several attempts by the Legislature to deep-six the tax, including one strong effort early on.

In that one the backers called a hearing and the only people who endorsed the repeal were the two backers.  Marlin Perkins, the late television personality, testified in favor of the program and gently told the legislators they would be the next thing to Godless criminals if they tampered with the tax.  The effort didn’t get out of committee and no other repealer has made it to the ballot.

The tax has reached across the outdoor spectrum, but nowhere has it been more valuable and apparent than in what it has done for Missouri’s wetland resources. The Design for Conservation proposed five new wetland areas, geographically scattered, added to existing areas.  That goal has long since been surpassed-- Ten Mile Pond, Otter Slough, Coon Island, Four Rivers, Settles' Ford, Eagle Bluffs, B.K. Leach, Perry and Nodaway Valley are among the new wetland areas born of the tax.

Four Rivers is 13,732-acres in Bates and Vernon counties.  It claims parentage from money not just from the Missouri conservation tax but also the federal Pittman-Robertson tax.  It has become the premier wetland area in Western Missouri and lies across the path of Lt. Zebulon Pike, who headed west up the Osage River.  He camped on what now is the area’s West Unit Aug. 19-31, 1806.

More than 2,000 acres of the original 6,696-acre unit is restored wetland, and an additional 6,975 acres has been added through the federal Wetland Reserve Program.  It, as much as any Missouri wetland area, is a cooperative venture, involving the Department, Ducks Unlimited, Natural Resources Conservation Service (the old ASC), Missouri Prairie Foundation, The Nature Conservancy and others.

In 1970, the Department blew its entire acquisition budget to buy a chunk of river bottom on the Mississippi River south of Hannibal, Mark Twain’s home town.  It would become the Ted Shanks Conservation Area, still a major waterfowl concentrating area.  The Department owns just over 3,000 of the 5,536 acres, while the rest is Corps of Engineers land, managed by the Department.

Today tax money is working to upgrade both habitat and structures to make the Shanks area more agreeable to migrating waterfowl.  The 1993 Mississippi River flood hammered the infrastructure of the venerable wetland, forcing extensive renovation and repair expense.

Shanks is one of many cooperative ventures, both before and after the conservation tax, that have made Missouri a jewel along the Mississippi Flyway.  After the disastrous 1993 floods on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, many bottomland farmers just gave it up.  By 1994, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the department began buying land from willing sellers to create a necklace of public wetlands between St. Louis and Kansas City (the federal part is called the Big Muddy National Wildlife Refuge, but is open to hunting).

Money for the federal part of the project comes from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. So far, 10,400 acres is part of the Refuge, with plans for an eventual 60,000 additional acres.  Some are accessible by road, but some are only reachable by boat off the Missouri River.  It’s backwoods hunting on often rugged land.

Several conservation department areas are interspersed along the 200-mile stretch of river.  Overton Bottoms, near Boonville, is one where my son and I have hunted ducks in borrow pits on the river side of the levee and doves on the agricultural side.

None of these areas is developed for waterfowl hunting as yet—no early morning drawings for blinds or other services.  But they are eminently agreeable to walk-in hunting and whatever jerry-rig setup you can devise for a blind.  It’s a half-mile hike from the parking lot to one pothole at Overton, but there’s enough bankside vegetation for a hide and there almost always are a few ducks to shoot at.

Dave Erickson, chief of the department’s wildlife division, says, “We bought many tracts after the 1993 and 1995 floods along the Missouri River with varied sources of money.  Marion Bottom was with MDC funds, NAWCA monies, WRP funds and numerous others like Missouri River Fish and Wildlife mitigation, Big Muddy NWR funds and so forth.

“These tracts are all technically wetlands but most are wet only during floods.  Most won’t be developed in the way of an Eagle Bluffs or Grand Pass--we could never afford it, and that was never the intent.  The purpose was primarily to provide some elbow room for the river to spread out during floods and to provide flood storage capacity.”

Without the tax and the flood those areas would not exist for public use.   The Missouri River always has been a magnet for waterfowl along with its tributaries, especially the Grand in north Missouri.  Most of the state’s major waterfowl areas owe their presence to the Missouri and Grand.

Grand Pass Conservation Area is perhaps the richest in terms of waterfowl concentrations.  Its very name evokes the Grand Passage of waterfowl in historic times.  The 5,300-acre Saline County area has six miles of Missouri River frontage, intensively managed for waterfowl.

It’s an example of cooperative management, too—Ducks Unlimited donated a pump capable of sucking 60,000 gallons a minute out of the River to water the wetlands when needed.  It was DU’s first matching grant project in the state.

Dave Erickson says, “The effects of the sales tax on Missouri's wetlands?  Wow!  Without it, we might have gotten one or two completed, not the list of new areas we now have.”

For the past several years the Missouri River has been low, mired in drought, sandbars exposed and no clue that it ever stretched from bluff to bluff, the way it has done and will again.  Even as the murky 1993 flood waters ripped levees and undid decades of waterfowl management on established areas adjacent to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, they set the stage for the Conservation Department to buy added areas with money that would not have been there without voter approval 30 years ago.

Floods will come again and levees will fail, but conservation dollars will build and rebuild and waterfowl hunters will look to the morning skies to glimpse a flittering flock of ducks or a stately skein of geese against the golden sunrise.

And it only costs a penny on eight dollars….

Joel Vance is the author of Grandma and the Buck Deer (softcover $15); Bobs, Brush and Brittanies (hardcover $22); Tails I Lose (hardcover $25); Down Home Missouri (hardcover $25); and Autumn Shadows (limited edition $65).  Available from Cedar Glade Press, Box 1664, Jefferson City MO 65102.  Add $2/book for S/H.