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Click to Enlarge Ray and Sunny Oberkramer (left photo) are landowners and Stream Team members. Sunny, right, with grandchildren Timothy, left, and Morgan, make conservation a family activity.

“We want everybody with all points of view involved.”

LaBarque Creek in Jefferson County drains water from a 13-square-mile watershed into the Meramec River.

It does so delightfully. Twisting, turning, tumbling and gurgling, it slides through steep rock canyons and falls over imposing cliffs. Moist, cool nooks and crannies in the sandstone rock near the stream serve as refuges for blueberries, club mosses and the intensely pink fame flower.

“To people tuned into the aesthetics of a landscape, LaBarque is just eye-candy,” said Mike Arduser, a natural history biologist for the Conservation Department’s St. Louis Region. “The acidic soils from the sandstone make for a different suite of plants than you’ll find elsewhere in Missouri. Most people can’t help but be drawn to that kind of beauty.”

LaBarque Creek is remarkably healthy, especially for a stream so close to St. Louis. Fisheries biologists count 42 different species of fish in the 6-mile-long stream. Other nearby Meramec tributaries average just 10 species. In the 1960s, Stewart Udall, then secretary of the interior, considered the area for a national park.

The watershed has remained pristine in the face of Jefferson County’s rapid growth because the steep topography of the landscape has fended off development, and because local landowners love the area too much to risk spoiling it.

That’s why residents of the watershed came out in droves to the LaBarque Creek Festival held in April 2005. Of the 1,300 people who live in the watershed, more than 300 attended the event. They learned more about the history and biology of the area and discussed ways they could protect the unique resource they called home.

“That was really the kickoff to the watershed planning process,” said Tracy Boaz, the community conservationist working out of the Powder Valley Conservation Nature Center. “We couldn’t have a plan without the enthusiasm and interest of landowners.”

Most of the landowners involved in the planning process are primarily interested in protecting the natural qualities of the LaBarque Creek watershed without causing economic hardship.

Ray Oberkramer, who owns 300 acres in the watershed and hosted one of the first planning meetings at his home, grew up in the area. He recalled how 60 years ago he would catch crayfish and bluegill from LaBarque Creek. He said it was important for people to get the value from their land, but, he added, “I’d hate to see someone come in and scrape the tops off the mountains and fill the valleys and take the sides of the hills and call them common ground.”

He said as they learn more about the natural values of the watershed, landowners are eager to have a say in the planning process. Membership in the LaBarque Creek Stream Team, which his wife, Sunny, started, is also rising.

“More and more people are getting involved,” Oberkramer said, “and that’s all good.”

The creation of a plan for LaBarque Creek watershed coincides with a county master plan revision. Boaz said the Jefferson County government is willing to work with the landowners and the Conservation Department to balance natural resource and development issues.

“It isn’t a question of whether the area is going to develop,” said Martin Toma, director of land use, development and code enforcement for Jefferson County. “We just hope to produce something that will provide guidance for landowners and government so we can achieve our mutual goals of preserving the value of the resource.”

Joining in the planning are a couple handfuls of conservation partners, including the Missouri Chapter of The Nature Conservancy; the Ozark Regional Land Trust; the Trust for Public Land; the Open Space Council; the Missouri Conservation Heritage Foundation; the East-West Gateway Council of Governments; the St. Louis District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; the LaBarque Creek Watershed Partners; the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Technical and general committees meet regularly to hammer out details of the plan, which will include terrestrial and aquatic inventories, Geographic Information Systems data and surveys of residents and other stakeholders.

“We are trying to involve all the people,” Boaz said. “We want everybody with all points of view involved. That’s the only way to develop a plan that’s actually going to work.”

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