Effigy Mounds, National Park Service address unauthorized "Serious Mismanagement Report" recently made public

by Bob Beach

The National Park Service (NPS) continues to deal with the aftermath of numerous projects at Effigy Mounds National Monument in Allamakee County that, according to the NPS, were undertaken between 1999 and 2009 without completing compliance requirements to ensure that no archaeologically significant artifacts would be disturbed by the projects. Most recently, an unofficial report that was completed in April of 2014 entitled “Serious Mismanagement Report” was released to the public earlier this month by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEERS), prompting the NPS to initially deny the existence of the report, a claim that was later revised to say that the report had not been "agency approved".
NPS spokesperson Christine Powell said that a “larger process” is still ongoing to assess and learn from what happened at Effigy Mounds, adding that a full report is expected to be completed in late fall of this year. Unlike the unofficial “Serious Mismanagement Report,” Powell said that the larger report is being compiled by NPS employees from outside Effigy Mounds and the Midwest region who had no connection to the specific incidents at Effigy Mounds.
Tim Mason of McGregor, a spokesperson for Friends of Effigy Mounds and a former longtime employee of the national monument, said that the anticipated full report is “just a larger continuation of the larger cover-up” and that the Serious Mismanagement Report “says it all - I don’t think they need another report.”
The Serious Mismanagement report, authored by NPS Special Investigator David Barland-Liles, current Effigy Mounds Chief Ranger Bob Palmer, current Effigy Mounds Superintendent Jim Nepstad and archaeologist Caven Clark, PhD, stated that from 1999 to 2009, “… park staff failed to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and/or the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on at least 78 projects using $3,368,704 in federal funds.” The report also found that lack of oversight at the Midwest Regional Office of the NPS was at least partially responsible for the continued mismanagement at Effigy Mounds, noting, “When oversight was finally provided, a decade of dysfunction was uncovered.”
Powell pointed out that the “Serious Mismanagement Report” is not an official NPS service report and that it was not authorized by the NPS. “Staff at Effigy Mounds took it upon themselves to compile that report, though I’m sure it was not malicious,” Powell said. She said that anything helpful in that report would be used and incorporated into the larger assessment. “No cover-up was intended,” she added.
Current Effigy Mounds Superintendent Jim Nepstad said that he has “100 percent confidence” that a decision was made to use this report as a starting point for an agency-wide report that will educate all NPS employees about what went wrong at Effigy Mounds. He said that the larger official report is being authored by high-ranking experts with no ties to the incidents at Effigy Mounds.
The unofficial report, Nepstad said, wouldn’t work in that format because the team that compiled the Serious Mismanagement Report experienced first-hand the events that took place or lived with the aftermath. He said that the report was completed by people who are too close to the park and too close to the issues at hand to objectively report on those issues.
“This report led to the larger report being commissioned,” Nepstad said, adding that the process of compiling the Serious Mismanagement Report led his team to recognize valuable lessons that could be learned from Effigy Mounds on a regional and even national level. “We all had a desire to get the idea out there that there are things to be learned from what happened at Effigy Mounds,” he added. “We weren’t thinking at the national level when we started, but realized what we were learning could be applied to other parks.”
It was that realization that led to the report being shared with the regional office, Nepstad said, but it was never distributed, even at the park level, so he does not know how the report came to be made public.
Nepstad also pointed out that the NPS has made some changes in the wake of what happened at Effigy Mounds between 1999 and 2009. Most significantly, he said that funding for projects is now tied to completion of compliance requirements under the National Historic Preservation Act and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act; no funds are released for projects until the compliance requirements are met. He noted that the Midwest Regional Office was the first region to institute that change.
Nepstad said that the Regional office has also been doing a better job on project oversight and that other proactive improvements had been implemented, even before the Serious Mismanagement Report was shared with the Regional office. For example, he said that all Park Superintendents are required to participate in training regarding compliance with existing laws designed to protect historical and natural resources, adding that he participated in such a training late last summer in which he shared his experience in dealing with the aftermath of what took place under his predecessor at Effigy Mounds.
“There’s barely a day when I don’t have to deal with the aftermath,” Nepstad said. “I would hate for another Superintendent to have to go through this.”