Effigy Mounds getting fresh start

Officials at Effigy Mounds National Monument are hoping to move beyond the embarrassment resulting from a decade's worth of unauthorized development at one of the continent's foremost Indian spiritual and cultural sites.

“My top priority will be to help get the park back to doing things the way they were meant to be done,” said Jim Nepstad, who will take over Jan. 3 as superintendent at Effigy Mounds, which was established to preserve and make accessible to the public more than 200 Indian burial and effigy mounds.

“I am looking forward to talking face to face with the people who are most passionate about preserving Effigy Mounds,” said Nepstad, 49, chief of planning and resource management at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Bayfield, Wis., and a 25-year Park Service employee.

During the past 10 years, the National Park Service built three elevated trails and a maintenance shed at Effigy Mounds without first securing clearances under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires federal agencies to consider the impact of projects on “significant historic properties.”

After an internal review discovered the failure to comply, Phyllis Ewing, who served as superintendent at Effigy Mounds when most of the violations occurred, was reassigned to the regional office in Omaha, where she now helps manage museum collections.

Mike Evans, who relieved Ewing as acting superintendent on May 24, said her reassignment has been the only punishment for the failure to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act.

“Other than that, we don't talk about internal personnel matters,” he said.

Tom Sinclair, who was responsible for Section 106 compliance, has been relieved of that duty but remains at Effigy Mounds as chief of maintenance, Evans said.

Ewing, who subscribes to Harry Truman's adage that “the buck stops here,” said Monday that she takes full responsibility for the failure to comply with the law.

“The important thing is that the park is being well cared for and moving forward,” she said.

It is also important that the National Park Service provide a full accounting of all the violations that have occurred at Effigy Mounds and remove all traces of the unauthorized projects, said Tim Mason of rural McGregor, an environmental activist who worked 19 years at Effigy Mounds as a seasonal employee.

Glossing over the malfeasance “is a slap in the face to the affiliated tribes that hold that ground to be sacred, to the naturalists who have worked to preserve it and to the taxpayers who have expended about $3 million during the past decade on projects that violated the National Historic Preservation Act,” Mason said.

A document secured by Mason through the Freedom of Information Act shows that more than 90 percent of the $3.37 million spent on Effigy Mounds projects during Ewing's tenure was not compliant with the National Historic Preservation Act.

The aboveground portions of an unfinished, elevated boardwalk trail to the Nazekaw mounds across Highway 76 from the visitors center were removed in September, Evans said.

Removal of the underground concrete footings “would have required soil disturbance, and no one wanted to do that at this time,” Evans said.

An unauthorized hoop-and-fabric maintenance shed with a crushed rock base will be removed at a time when it can be done with minimal disturbance to the soil, he said.

None of the unauthorized projects “caused any damage to the mounds that I am aware of,” Evans said.

Evans said, however, that the Parks Service has no plans to remove the Yellow River Trail, another elevated boardwalk that was built without full compliance at a cost of more than $800,000.

“We're still planning to connect that trail with Effigy Mounds' South Unit” to improve visitor access to the site of the impressive “Marching Bears” mounds, he said.

Evans said that project was initiated before Ewing's tenure as superintendent and is “not even close to any mounds. I don't know why we would take that out,” he said.

Evans said planning for the connection to the South Unit “is not even to the point of a Section 106 study yet.”