The head of the state’s Department of Natural Resources says he’s in the awkward position of relying on the man suing his agency to go after the state’s most stubborn environmental offenders.

Childers	Nixon

A small portion of state environmental infractions are forwarded to Attorney General Jay Nixon’s office, which is charged with forcing violators to comply in court. The awkward thing is that Nixon is also suing DNR over an old railroad bridge in Boonville that some want to use for the Katy Trail State Park. "One day they’re our lawyer and the next day they’re suing us," DNR Director Doyle Childers said. "That doesn’t engender a great deal of comfort."

Childers explained the sticky situation to local leaders and environmentalists yesterday at an open meeting at the Daniel Boone Building. It was one of the director’s dozens of stops around the state to answer questions about the department and to take suggestions for how to improve DNR.

Kurt Schaefer, DNR’s deputy director and general council, said DNR can take care of most environmental violations in-house. But the political tensions have, to some extent, hampered communication between departments on the few cases that require help from the attorney general’s office.

"Like in any situation, it is difficult when your lawyer is not giving you as much information as you would like to have," Schaefer said. He later added, "Obviously, the more open communication you have with your trial lawyer, the better. I’ll just leave it at that."

Hostility between the two departments flared over a legal battle surrounding the railroad bridge in Boonville. Childers and Gov. Matt Blunt want the historic bridge dismantled for use elsewhere by Union Pacific Railroad. Nixon sided with local activists and sued to stop the bridge from being removed."If you detect tension there, there is," Childers said.

Childers is a Republican who served for decades in the Missouri General Assembly before Blunt appointed him in 2005 to head DNR. Nixon, a Democrat, is expected to challenge Blunt in the 2008 race for governor.

In an interview this morning, Childers said the political animosity between himself and Nixon was not, to his knowledge, affecting the department’s ability to prosecute environmental violations.

"Most of the attorneys working over there do a great job," he said. "It’s probably more the political ramifications and the uncertainty."

John Fougere, spokesmen for the attorney general’s office, agreed that the political tensions higher up have not stopped the agencies’ professional staffs from cooperating. "Not at all. It’s completely irrelevant," Fougere said.

But at yesterday’s meeting at Columbia’s city hall, Scott Dye, director of the national Sierra Club’s Water Sentinel program, said DNR was not doing a good enough job enforcing its regulations. He said the department, with help from the attorney general, needs to come down hard on violators with a "stick."

"If you don’t have a stick, all you’ve got is a big bag of carrots," said Dye, who was holding a bag of snack carrots at the time.

In an interview this morning, Dye said he was worried politics could be getting in the way of protecting the environment.

"It does concern me that there does seem to be some dysfunction between the department and the attorney general’s office," he said. "In that kind of situation, the environment and the state’s citizens are the ones who suffer."