Odd Ducks

Some are clad in coats and ties, others in sweaters and Dockers. A few are dressed in camouflage hunting garb, baseball caps and boots. The guests include landowners, officials from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Missouri departments of Conservation and Natural Resources. Also present are representatives from private advocacy groups, including the Coalition for the Environment, the American Land Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

They are here to talk about transforming St. Charles County, which is 45 minutes away when traffic is light.

Alliance board members raise their hands as they're introduced by Musick, who acts as emcee. Peter von Gontard, Huntleigh city attorney and a founder of the silk-stocking firm Sandberg, Phoenix & von Gontard, can trace ties with the Busch family back to 1895, when his great-grandfather Baron Paul von Gontard, once a director of the Mercedes Benz & Manser Corporation, met and later married Clara Busch, daughter of brewery founder Adolphus Busch. Charles Hager is an executive at Hager Hinge Company, a privately held hardware manufacturer that employs nearly 1,000 people and generated an estimated $150 million in revenue in 2000, according to the St. Louis Business Journal. He's worried about a plan to expand St. Charles County's Smartt Airfield, which he fears will put jets amid ducks on his land that lies in a direct line to the runway.

Not present is James Thomas Blair IV, grandson of former Missouri Governor James Blair, who held office from 1957-61. Blair is so keen on ducks that he proposed to his wife in a duck blind on opening day, hiring a plane to tow a banner asking her to marry him. Save for a stint on the state conservation commission, he eschews politics and earns his living as principal at the Moneta Group, a financial-planning firm.

Despite their pedigrees, alliance leaders consider themselves underdogs. Developers have the upper hand, Busch insists. "They can influence the politicians because they've got a ton of money," he says, without a trace of irony. "I thought we'd have a life span of two years and people would give up."

This cocktail party is as much a getting-acquainted session as anything else. For all their money, alliance board members know they can't accomplish their mission by themselves -- and so they are cultivating allies.

After a half-hour of munching hors d'oeuvres and mingling, the crowd turns its attention to Musick, who gives a brief tutorial on the alliance, its goals and its finances. In 2000, the alliance raised slightly more than $114,000, according to its tax returns. The alliance hasn't yet filed a return for 2001, but Musick says the group has raised about $500,000 since its inception, with the single largest chunk coming from the James and Aune Nelson Foundation, an Illinois conservation fund that has contributed at least $100,000. The audience applauds politely when Musick announces that Anheuser-Busch has also made a $25,000 donation. Someone boos when Musick announces that a representative is present from the Corps of Engineers, which issues permits to fill wetlands and sets 100-year-flood thresholds low enough to make development possible.

For months, the alliance has been talking quietly with environmental groups such as the National Wildlife Federation and the Audubon Society. Tonight, they're going public with their grand vision: a national wildlife refuge that would put 55,000 acres of St. Charles County floodplain off-limits to development.

The proposed Confluence National Wildlife Refuge would be the state's tenth and one of the largest (the Big Muddy refuge, a scattering of parcels along the Missouri River stretching from Kansas City to St. Louis, is less than 10,000 acres, but U.S. Fish and Wildlife plans to expand the refuge to 60,000 acres).

It would also be the closest to an urban area.

And it will be hugely controversial.

The alliance wants to do more than freeze things as they are. By purchasing development rights or buying land outright, the alliance hopes to protect thousands of acres of farmland and property already zoned for commercial use. The fate of the duck clubs varies. In some cases, club owners would either donate or sell development rights. In others, the alliance's map shows that some clubs will continue as they always have, with preservation dependent on the noblesse oblige of landowners.

The map isn't set in stone. Musick says he and other alliance members will forfeit development rights, and he expects that other club owners will eventually do the same. Farther from the river, the game gets tougher. By surrounding commercially zoned land with refuge property, Musick hopes to cool the fires of development and persuade construction companies and municipalities to retreat. Although the alliance's written plan says all land and development rights will come from willing donors or sellers, Musick doesn't rule out the acquisition of property through eminent domain. "There's always a possibility," he says. "I can't rule anything out at this stage of the game on what might happen. I think that you're going to see an awful lot of push-back from a couple of municipalities. This doesn't have to be a war. It has that potential, I grant you."