Has Branson become a victim of its own growth?

BY DOUG JOHNSON

The Associated Press

BRANSON, Mo. --- As a stream of cars and tourist-packed buses begins to back up along Route 65, motorists' faces turn shades of red that could rival the surrounding fall foliage.

The cause of backup, and subsequent rage, is a single highway construction worker who is holding a sign asking drivers to "please be patient" while road crews prepare their dynamite.

Then, with a thunderous BOOM!, another piece of the Ozark mountains is blown away to make room for a bigger highway with more cars, more buses and more billboards.

Welcome to Branson, a quaint village tucked away in the quiet hills visited by nearly 7 million people a year.

Like other popular tourist destinations across the country, Branson has become a victim of its own charm. And the people who live here 365 days a year are beginning to worry about the future of their own lives down this mountain-scarred road.

"I came here because this is God's country. You will find nowhere else the kind of beauty you see in the Ozarks," said Shirley Keener, a clerk at the KC General Store in downtown Branson.

"But it's real hard to live here with all the constant traffic, all the buses, the people in a hurry to get to their shows," she said, then lowering her voice to a near whisper, "The tourists make you want to pull your hair out."

Visitors pack into this town of 5,000 to play in the surrounding lakes during the day and frequent the 51 neon-lit theaters at night. But when the tourists leave, all of the trash and pollution they brought with them remains.

Branson and the cities around it are struggling to strike a balance between welcoming tourists and their money and dealing with resentment over their effect on everything from sewage to sprawl.

"The problems around us are not going to go away, they're only going to get bigger," said Peter Herschend, vice chairman of Branson's popular neighbor, Silver Dollar City. "Can we have both economic growth and environmental quality? I think we can. But the community is going to have to work at it."

The same struggle can be seen in cities like Key West, Fla., where the tourist boom has taken a toll on water quality. In Lancaster County, Pa., the Amish lifestyle that made the area famous is under siege from 5 million visitors a year.

A little closer to the hearts of Ozarkers, much of the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee have also been paved over with strip malls and theme-parks like Dollywood to accommodate visitors.

Branson's commercial growth took off earlier this decade, especially after television's "60 Minutes" declared in 1991 that Branson had become the nation's country music capital. Last year, the city ranked among America's top motor-coach destinations, according to the National Tour Association.

But several residents sold their property 20 years ago, before the boom, to developers with keen foresight. Now, locals benefit little from the tourist influx, Midkiff said.

Midkiff warned that these Ozark hot spots needed to determine when to say enough is enough with commercialization that caters to visitors. "At some point, it will become the kind of place that nobody wants to go to," he said.

The leaders of Branson, and other cities like it, are starting to acknowledge the problem and are looking for answers.

After the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed Pennsylvania's Lancaster County as one of the nation's most endangered historic spots, area planners began a campaign to draw tourists to the county's Civil War attractions and away from Amish farms.

Branson spokesman Jerry Adams said his city has initiated a landscape ordinance that requires developers to replant the same number of trees that they dig up on their property, or face a fine.

Branson was also the first city in the state to install phosphorus removal equipment to its two water treatment plants, he said.

"The hardest thing about striking a balance is trying to provide city services for both residents and visitors. We have a small city that we have to run as if there were hundreds of thousands of people living here," he said.

More recently, the Branson Chamber of Commerce sponsored a regional environmental conference in October called "Managing Our Growth, Sustaining our Future." It was attended by hundreds of local and state leaders, as well as residents.

At one of the meetings, where governors of both Missouri and Arkansas showed up, the two states agreed to confront jointly the pollution that is threatening the Ozarks waterways.

Happily, several developers also attended the conference and seemed interested in helping find answers.

"Yes, I'm a dirty businessman looking for a profit, but I also want to do the right thing," said John Griesemer, chief operations officer of Springfield Underground. "Someone needs to let us know what the right thing is so we can work towards it."

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