Tellico Village Property Owners Association board members received some possibly good news Feb. 17 during an Asian carp committee quarterly update.
Sue English-Kovar, committee member, highlighted actions that have been taken on the federal and state level to combat the invasive species.
“First on the federal level, and I’m certain many of you know this, that a certain Senate Bill 1811 that within it Section 509 included a pilot program to be carried out on the Tennessee and/or Cumberland River watersheds was passed in the Senate, in the House on Dec. 8,” English-Kovar said. “And as a part of yet another larger bill was passed into law on Dec. 27. Again, the big part of that is that it provides $25 million, and that reportedly those funds will be directed to the Army Corps of Engineers to install barriers.”
On a state level, Tennessee Valley Authority has started a programmatic environmental assessment, which will examine all dams in the TVA system, available barrier technologies and environmental impacts of barriers.
The assessment is a multi-agency effort, and a draft report of TVA’s findings is anticipated to be completed late summer, English-Kovar said.
Gov. Bill Lee in September created the Asian Carp Advisory Commission, which met for the first time in December.
“Essentially, at their first meeting basically they sat down and they reviewed what do we know at this point in time about where the Asian carp are located, where it looks like they’re migrating to and from,” English-Kovar said. “Also they talked a lot about the different kinds of control particularly in the west side of the state that people are trying to do to fend off the Asian carp. The good news was that it was reported that the Asian carp don’t seem to be trying to move upstream at this time.”
Carla Johnson, committee member, said instead of the carp moving upstream, it seems some of the fish have begun migrating back to Kentucky.
“The TVA tagged 400,000 Asian carp to just kind of see where they were going,” Johnson said. “They’ve found that most of them actually turned around and went back to Kentucky Lake. They’re not actually sure why. I don’t know if that’s because — I know that they are doing some mitigation efforts, and maybe they’re reducing the population enough that they decided they weren’t as overcrowded after all, and they wanted to go back home. I don’t know. That is good news for upstream migration, however.”
Lee’s advisory commission requested Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency fund an economic impact study to be completed by the University of Tennessee in six months, English-Kovar said.
Rick Blough, POA board president, asked if the committee had recommendations for actions property owners can take in the meantime.
“Keep those letters going to representative (Tim) Burchett for one,” English-Kovar said. “In fact, what we will do is out on the POA website, we do have representative Burchett’s information out there, but I think what we should also do is put the information for the person who’s heading up this Tennessee committee, and that is Tennessee senator (Mike) Bell.”
The POA’s Asian carp committee is comprised of English-Kovar, Johnson, Pat White and Marty Inkrott.
