Old battles recalled as DOGE targets Valentine’s Niobrara ‘scenic river’ visitor center
Reprinted from York News-Times
Written by Todd Vonkampen
A 14-year-old Valentine tourist attraction and heir to 80 years of Niobrara River controversies has been targeted by the second Trump administration’s budget-cutters.
The new Department of Governmental Efficiency’s online “Wall of Receipts” lists the U.S. National Park Service in Valentine among five Nebraska locations where office leases have been canceled.
Others elsewhere on the searchable webpage are an Internal Revenue Service office in Scottsbluff, a Natural Resources Conservation Service office in Lincoln and Small Business Administration and Food and Drug Administration offices in Omaha.
The Valentine entry on DOGE’s website gives no other information except the 6,234-square-foot size of the Park Service’s contracted space and a stated contract value of $151,670.
But the listing refers to the Niobrara National Scenic River Visitor Center, opened in 2011 on U.S. Highway 20 as headquarters for Park Service activities along 76 miles of the Niobrara from Valentine east to Newport.
Congress approved and President George H.W. Bush signed a 1991 bill naming that stretch Nebraska’s first National Scenic River. The designation followed successful 1970s resistance to flooding, much of it behind the would-be Norden Dam, proposed for irrigation as early as 1946.
Center still open
The roughly 8,000-square-foot Park Service office and Niobrara River interpretative center remains open to visitors for now.
But the building’s owners, George and Karen Johnson of Cody, said the U.S. General Services Administration notified them by email Feb. 28 that the Park Service’s lease will be canceled when the 2024-25 federal fiscal year ends Sept. 30.
That would be after the coming summer tourism season, when thousands of people are expected to swim, float, and kayak the picturesque Niobrara through Smith Falls State Park and adjoining lands along the scenic river.
A Friday statement from Park Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., gave no hints on the future of the agency’s northern Nebraska presence.
“The National Park Service is committed to upholding our responsibilities to visitors and is working with GSA to ensure facilities or alternative options will be available as we embrace new opportunities for optimization and innovation in workforce management,” it said.
“As always, NPS will continue to provide and deliver excellent customer service and will remain focused on ensuring that every visitor has the chance to explore and connect with the incredible, iconic spaces of our national parks.”
U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer of Valentine has asked the Park Service for information about DOGE’s listing of the Niobrara visitor center, Fischer’s Nebraska press secretary, Emma Hoffschneider, said Friday.
Regina Osburn, executive director of Cherry County Tourism, said she hasn’t heard whether the Park Service would seek another site in or near Valentine or transfer or eliminate its dozen or so Niobrara Scenic River employees.
They’ve lent valuable help in securing other tourism-friendly designations for the scenic river, she said, including the world’s second of three global “quiet trail” labels in October 2023.
“They serve a very good part (locally) in the education of the public of what’s along the river,” Osburn said. “There’s a lot of history there.”
Cherry County’s tourism industry has flowered as a result of the seasonal visitor traffic to enjoy the Niobrara, with new hotels built and others expanded in Valentine, she and Johnson said.
But Mike Murphy, a member of the four-county Niobrara Council that brings together public and private stakeholders along the river, said the Park Service reneged on its promised $100,000 in annual support to the council even before President Donald Trump returned to office Jan. 20.
He added that the council, which also engages in educational activities on the Niobrara, gets $52,500 a year in state help that’s also uncertain due to budget shortfalls in Lincoln.
If the Park Service center closes, “I think between Cherry, Keya Paha, Brown and Rock counties, if we’re worried about tourism and outfitting, they’d work together” to keep promoting them, Murphy said.
But he joined Osborn and Johnson in saying some residents wouldn’t mourn losing the visitor center or the Park Service presence itself.
“In my opinion, it will be catastrophic,” Johnson told The Telegraph Friday. “But maybe some people would disagree with me.”
Canceled 1 year early
Johnson, also owner of Cody’s George Paul Vinegar and its associated vineyards west of Valentine, said a 2021 extension of the Park Service’s original 10-year visitor center lease was set to expire Sept. 30, 2026.
Either party can cancel the lease with 90 days’ notice, he said. But “I suspect there will be more discussion about it, because it’s going to affect a lot of people and businesses.”
The $151,670 listed by DOGE “is close to what we get paid” annually, whether it should be or not, Johnson said.
Some Valentine-area residents “think that’s a terrible waste. And they probably shouldn’t be paying that much.” But locals “don’t know the whole story.”
The visitor center location between U.S. 20’s Nebraska Highway 97 and U.S. 83 junctions once held a car dealership, followed by a bait shop and then a sporting goods store.
It costs Johnson and his wife $50,000 a year to maintain the building, he said, on top of about $700,000 they borrowed to gut and remodel it to strict federal specifications.
“Had I found a contractor who could do this, it would have cost a lot more money because he would have added 20, 25% to it,” he said. “I became the contractor because I wanted to hire everybody from Valentine that I could.”
Johnson said the contract terms, also dictated by the federal government, automatically raised rent payments based on the Consumer Price Index.
They varied little for years, but “with inflation going on, we got an annual increase of $3,000 combined over the last two years,” he said.
He makes a profit on the visitor center building, he said, though he still has a bank debt of $200,000 to $300,000 from its renovation.
But the Park Service only pays rent on the 6,234 square feet noted in the DOGE listing, Johnson added — even though computer, lighting and other building systems sit in the 21.6% the agency doesn’t officially pay for.
“If something goes wrong, I fix it,” he said. “That’s the deal.”
Echoes of battles past
Visitors to the Valentine building encounter “a beautiful interpretive center” featuring colorful photos and descriptions of the National Scenic River stretch’s unique intersection of North American geology and plant and animal life, Johnson said.
“This is where it all came together, and it’s a very good example of the western part of the country and the eastern part of their country,” he said.
Though the visitor center relates millions of years of natural history, seven decades of human interaction underlie its presence and future.
Four years of study led the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 1959 to float an “O’Neill Unit” system of irrigation canals to water 71,000 acres of farmland in Holt County, 100 miles east.
It would have taken 30,000 acres of land for the Norden Dam, 18 miles northwest of Ainsworth, and a 19-mile-long lake that would have been Nebraska’s third largest after Lake McConaughy and Harlan County Lake. Smith Falls, Nebraska’s tallest waterfall, would have been near the west edge.
Congress authorized Norden Dam construction in 1971. But groups such as the Audubon Society and Wildlife Society were already mobilizing against losing what then-state Game Commission Bruce Cowgill of Silver Creek called “one of the last primitive areas in our state” in a Lincoln Journal story.
Some ranchers near the river also objected to losing grazing land to the project. More than 80 people formed the Save the Niobrara River Association in June 1975, with eight landowners joining it in seeking a U.S. District Court injunction against Norden Dam.
As then-U.S. Rep. Virginia Smith of Chappell and other supporters pressed to start work, U.S. District Judge Warren Urbom found fatal flaws in the project’s 1972 environmental impact study in March 1977 and again in April 1979. Both rulings followed lengthy trials.
With Norden more or less on the shelf, two Valentine-area couples began urging Congress to name the Niobrara east of Valentine a national scenic river — a step urged by the National Wildlife Federation as early as 1972.
A bill to that effect won unanimous Senate consent and 333-71 House approval in May 1991. It was sponsored and voted for by all members of Nebraska’s congressional delegation except Rep. Bill Barrett of Lexington, Smith’s 3rd District successor, who called in vain for further study.
But 20 years passed before the opening of Valentine’s visitor center, as the Park Service discerned its role from an initial O’Neill office with help from the Niobrara Scenic River Advisory Committee, a predecessor to the current Niobrara Council.
It wasn’t until 2008 that the Park Service appointed the scenic river’s first full-time superintendent, Dan Foster. He told the Omaha World-Herald then that a Niobrara visitor center in Valentine was a long-term goal.
It was realized in mid-December 2011, when Park Service employees moved into the Johnsons’ remodeled building from a Valentine location that George Johnson said was “about like a garage.”
But controversy along the Niobrara has never totally gone away.
The 11-year battle over designating the scenic river was as hotly fought as the Norden Dam had been. While some Niobrara landowners and outdoor outfitters cheered the designation, some 200 Nebraska opponents called the White House urging Bush to veto it.
“The government takeover of more land in Nebraska is basically what’s at stake,” then-Cherry County Commissioner Bill Ward said at the time. “They want to shove it down our throats, but we don’t want it.”
Talk of a lawsuit by the four affected counties came to nothing. But some landowners along the river have tried to keep recreational users off their segments, and Osborn and Murphy said locals get sore when the Park Service seeks to prevent alcohol use allowed by state law.
“The big challenge has always been (that) even though it’s a federal designation of a scenic river, it’s still private property,” said Murphy, also general manager of the Middle Niobrara Natural Resources District.
The ongoing strife was predicted at a March 1991 House hearing on the scenic-river bill. If it became law, then-Rep. Robert Smith of Oregon said, “there’s never going to be peace on the Niobrara.”
An identical 1990 bill gained strong support in both houses of Congress, but it failed to pass on the final vote of Virginia Smith’s eight-term career.
“They didn’t want her to go out with a loss in literally the last hour of her 16-year career in the House,” then-1st District Rep. Doug Bereuter of Utica — a cosponsor of the final law — said at that March 1991 hearing.
