-Edgar Miller, Riverkeeper/Executive Director
At its board meeting in Milwaukee, WI, on September 27, the Waterkeeper Alliance (WKA) board unanimously approved YRK’s request to expand its WKA jurisdiction to include Kerr Scott Reservoir and the upper River in western Wilkes and eastern Caldwell Counties, to the river’s headwaters in Watauga County. Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette, who serves on the WKA Board, made the motion to approve the request.
YRK’s previous jurisdiction spanned 3,858.5 square miles with a total population of just over one million residents. The upper boundary began in Wilkes County, just below the Kerr-Scott Reservoir (KSR) dam off NC 268 near Wilkesboro. The Yadkin flows east, then south through Yadkin, Surry, Forsyth, Davie, Davidson, Rowan, Montgomery and Stanly counties, most of the time forming the county boundaries. Major attributes of this jurisdiction include the Yadkin River State Trail, Pilot Mountain and Morrow Mountain State Parks, the confluence of the South Yadkin River with the Yadkin River containing significant public game lands, the Uwharrie National Forest, and four large hydroelectric dams, creating High Rock Lake (HRL), Tuckertown Reservoir, Badin Lake and Falls Reservoir. All four reservoirs are adjacent to public lands and other conserved areas and are heavily used for swimming, boating, hunting and fishing.
YRK’s new jurisdiction adds another 382 square miles including the KSR, upper river basin and mountain headwater streams. This adds approximately 24,400 residents to the YRK jurisdiction and increases the overall area covered by almost 10%. The Catawba and Watauga Riverkeeper jurisdictions border on the proposed expansion area and both wrote letters of support, along with the Army Corps of Engineers, Wilkes County Commissioners, Wilkesboro Town Council, Friends of Kerr Scott Lake, Blue Ridge Conservancy, Foothills Conservancy, and the Happy Valley Filling Station, a microbrewery located on the River in Patterson.
YRK will not require any additional staff for this expansion, most notably because we recently hired a Riverkeeper assistant/watershed protection specialist and a Yadkin River State Trail coordinator, both full-time positions, to support the executive director and Riverkeeper Edgar Miller, who has well established relationships with government officials, farmers, landowners, outfitters and other businesses in the region. YRK has responded to numerous threats to water quality in this region, including the dumping of asbestos-containing construction and demolition waste from a small church in the upper River, which ultimately resulted in the NCDEQ fining the perpetrators and requiring removal of the debris. We also sampled five sites in the new area during this year’s Swim Guide season and are working with local partners to extend the YRST above KSR to the Wilkes County line.
This jurisdiction expansion is significant because it contains the River’s headwaters and KSR, which is also experiencing many of the same water quality challenges as the lower Yadkin Lakes, including sediment and nutrient pollution and harmful algal blooms or HABs. The Friends of Kerr Scott Lake, which has 70 members, has already brought YRK into discussions with the Corps of Engineers and local government agencies to share what we have learned during our years of sampling on the River and High Rock Lake through WKA’s Pure Farms, Pure Water program and our work on HABs. The state recently declared the lower half of the KSR impaired for chlorophyll-a, making our presence in the upper watershed even more critical to address that concern given our experience addressing that problem on High Rock Lake and building support for the new HRL nutrient management rules, which will help address those problem in KSR as well.
This expansion would not have been possible without the engagement and approval of the YRK Board and the support of our members and other funders, who helped YRK build the capacity to service this new area. YRK is among only 25 percent of Riverkeeper organizations worldwide that are in full compliance with WKA’s 14 Quality Standards, another key factor in the WKA’s boards approval of the expansion request.