Legislative Roundup

A review of some of 2025’s most consequential
environmental legislation.

By Phillip Powell

As 2025 draws to a close, outdoors lovers should be on the lookout for a few major state and federal policy changes to public lands that could impact your next adventure around Arkansas.

Trails at Mena Project
In the push to expand the outdoor recreation economy in Arkansas, the little town of Mena — situated in the midst of the Ouachita National Forest at the base of Rich Mountain — is receiving some major state-funded upgrades to its public outdoor recreation infrastructure. Specifically, the state is helping to fund a new bike park on land overlapping Queen Wilhelmina State Park, the Ouachita National Forest, and the city of Mena. State senator Bart Hester, Republican leader from Cave Springs, sponsored a new law that clarified liability protections for a new bike lift system coming to the park. (A bike lift is just like a ski lift you might find in the tall, snowy mountains of Colorado– but you guessed it! They are for mountain bikers instead.)

As Hester explained, the new “Trails at Mena” project will include one of the state’s first bike lifts (there is a similar lift planned for a park in Bella Vista by the Walton-funded OZ Trails). With Hester’s new law on the books, bike lift construction is moving forward with clear rules for liability of operators, participants, and regulations on inspecting the new lifts well into the future. To read Act 155 in its entirety, go to arkleg.state.ar.us.

Flatside Wilderness Expansion
Expansion of the beautiful and centrally located Flatside Wilderness Area continues to wind its way through Congressional bureaucracy thanks to Congressman French Hill. The bill, which is titled the Flatside Wilderness Expansion Act, will expand the wilderness area by more than 2,200 acres. After the House of Representatives approved the bill in May, it was cleared by the Senate Agriculture Committee in October and appears likely to pass the full Senate in the upcoming session.

The bill has drawn praise from several environmental groups, including the Southern Environmental Law Center, the Ozark Society, and the National Wildlife Federation. Flatside was one of the original wilderness areas established in Arkansas back in the 1980s, and was previously expanded by Congress in 2019 through Hill’s efforts. As many outdoors enthusiasts know, a federal wilderness designation provides immense conservation and scenic protection to an area. An in-depth look at Flatside Wilderness Area, including ongoing efforts to increase its size, can be found in the September 2025 issue of Arkansas Wild.

“From bike lifts to wilderness bills, 2025 policy decisions could shape how Arkansans experience public lands for decades.”

Fix Our Forests Act
A controversial bipartisan bill authored by Arkansas Congressman Bruce Westerman and Senator John Boozman is also winding its way through Congress to streamline the permitting process and other bureaucratic hurdles associated with managing approximately 200 million acres of national forests, including around 2.9 million in Arkansas.

The bill has drawn significant backlash from many environmental groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center, the Sierra Club, and EarthJustice. But other groups like the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, the Nature Conservancy, and National Audubon Society support the legislation because of its efforts to tackle the growing threat of wildfires which has devastated communities in the Western United States. The bill would undeniably make it easier for timber companies to log more in national forests with less input from the public, especially in wet southern forests with little risk of wildfire, according to Anders Reynolds, Legislative Director at the Southern Environmental Law Center and a native of Wynne. But for advocates like Westerman and Boozman, along with their Democratic colleagues California Senator Alex Padilla and Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper, the bill opens up national forests to more active management with prescribed cutting and burns after decades of fire suppression and reduced management.

Buffalo River Industrial Farming Moratorium
The iconic Buffalo National River became a flashpoint in legislative debates this year, as a group of state legislators urged on by farm industry groups tried to pass a law putting the pause on permitting industrial hog farms near the river into question. Environmentalists drove the the Capitol week after week to implore legislators to choose a different path, and through the intervention of Governor Sarah Sanders — a major advocate of outdoor recreation — legislators came to a compromise to give themselves more oversight over future permit moratoriums while protecting the Buffalo River from hog farms far into the future. The bill, titled Act 921, did not substantively change state law, but tensions surrounding the bill were reminiscent of the earliest battles fought over the Buffalo River — between small generational farmers, back-to-the-land conservationists, state and federal government — and a reminder that the conversation, sometimes quite heated, continues.

Waters of the United States
The federal Environmental Protection Agency is moving forward with new regulations that will redefine which wetlands will receive federal protections in coming years. Specifically, the rule would redefine the term “Waters of the United States,” therefore redefining which bodies of water are protected by the federal Clean Water Act. A Supreme Court ruling in Sackett v. EPA has allowed the EPA to move forward with the deregulation, which could have major impacts on privately owned wetlands throughout the Arkansas Delta. If the rule goes into effect later this year as it’s written, landowners will be able to clear more wetlands without permits from the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Arkansas does not have state-level wetlands protections, and some researchers at the Environmental Defense Fund warn the rule could open up millions of acres of wetlands to unregulated development in coming years.