Conservation News

JEFFERSON CITY B If, 25 years ago, you had told fisheries management professionals that nearly 40,000 Missouri citizens were going to flock to their aid, donating millions of dollars worth of labor annually to monitor water quality, haul hundreds of tons of trash out of streams and lobby government officials to take better care of creeks and rivers, they might have said you were a cockeyed optimist.

If you had told downtown St. Louis residents a quarter century ago that they soon would be able to walk across the street and catch rainbow trout, they might have questioned your sanity. Yet these very things and many other astonishing changes have occurred since Missouri voters approved a sales tax for the Missouri Department of Conservation in 1976.

Missouri voters weren't content to make do with forest, fish and wildlife programs paid for exclusively with money from the sale of trapping, hunting and fishing permits. But they didn't consent to the sales tax concept blindly. In August 1975 the Conservation Department laid out a plan for how they would use money from the sales tax if it was approved. Voters liked the detailed proposal, called the "Design for Conservation." When they went to the polls a little more than a year later, they approved a one-eighth of 1 percent general sales tax earmarked for the Conservation Department's exclusive use.

Among the many promises conservation officials made was to upgrade fish hatcheries, provide better access to streams and build more lakes. Today, 25 years after sales tax revenues began arriving, Missourians have:

• Urban fishing programs that offer year-round fishing opportunities in Kansas City and St. Louis.
• 500 lake, river and stream accesses
• 125 community lakes and hundreds more on conservation areas.
• Outreach programs that introduce Missourians young and old to angling through local, how-to fishing clinics.
• State-of-the-art fish hatcheries that produce more than 20 million fish annually, compared to 5 million in 1976.