A longtime parks and recreation worker, and a dentist have joined the four-member Missouri Conservation Commission.
Dr. Steven Harrison, a dental specialist from Rolla, and Mark McHenry, a business consultant from Kansas City, were appointed to the commission by Gov. Mike Parson earlier this month.
Both men are expected to serve six-year unpaid terms with the commission responsible for appointing the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) director, tackling the budget, and facilitating other decisions.
Harrison and McHenry join Don Bedell and Barry Orscheln (both Republicans) on the commission; they replace David Murphy and Marilynn Bradford, whose terms expired in July.
Read on to learn more about the two newest commissioners.
Steven Harrison
Harrison is a dental specialist with a passion for hunting and fishing — so much so that he spends his free time teaching younger people the trade. He has a family tradition of fishing at Montauk State Park in Dent County.
Harrison said he learned to fish as soon as he could walk and particularly enjoys trout fishing.
“I am passionate about helping kids learn about and come to love hunting and fishing,” Harrison said. “I have been a mentor for young hunters for many years, and mentoring young hunters is more important than ever. We are seeing declining numbers of young hunters all across the country, including in Missouri where we are actually doing better than most states.”
“If we are going to preserve hunting, we must focus on attracting new hunters and providing quality land to hunt and fish and just enjoy the outdoors.”
Harrison and his wife live on a cattle farm in Rolla. Aside from the work he puts in at his dental practice, Harrison spends significant time outdoors where he’s gained skills he plans to bring to the commission, he said.
“I live the outdoor life everyday and have been active in conservation my whole life,” Harrison said.
Harrison is a consultant for the American Board of Orthodontics and the former president of the Edward H. Angle Society. Additionally, he is a founding board member of the Champions of Rolla Education.
He has a bachelor’s degree in life sciences from Missouri S&T, graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City Dental School, and has a Master of Science degree in orthodontics from the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
Mark McHenry
McHenry’s love of the outdoors has influenced much in his life — from his choice of schooling to his more than four decade career in parks and recreation. His first job, he said, was interning for the county conservation commission when he was still in high school, tasked with creating habitats, cleaning trash, and trapping wildlife.
He later moved to Kansas City where he began to work for its Parks and Recreation Department; he would eventually lead the department as its director from 2003 to 2018. Now, McHenry works as a business consultant for Ochsner Hare & Hare, the Olsson Studio, a landscape architecture firm.
“I’ve always been an outdoors person,” McHengry said. “Growing up in central Iowa, we were ‘free-range’ kids who spent our summers and after school running around in the woods and learning a lot about nature.”
He said he spent summers at a family cabin on a lake “swimming and fishing, and catching frogs and turtles and snakes in the marsh, and just messing around outside and in the woods.”
Aside from his love of the outdoors, McHenry brings his urban perspective to the commission.
“I am a voice for urban conservation,” he said. “Our challenge is to both bring nature and conservation into our urban areas. And to get folks from our urban areas out into rural nature, like at MDC conservation areas and other wild places.”
McHenry also enjoys running, hiking, and cycling.
McHenry has a bachelor’s degree in park management from Texas Tech University as well as a master’s in public administration from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is a member of the National Recreation and Parks Association, American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration, Missouri Parks and Recreation Association, and the Southwest Parks and Recreation Training Institute.
Kaitlyn Schallhorn was the editor in chief of The Missouri Times from 2020-2022. She joined the newspaper in early 2019 after working as a reporter for Fox News in New York City.
Throughout her career, Kaitlyn has covered political campaigns across the U.S., including the 2016 presidential election, and humanitarian aid efforts in Africa and the Middle East.
She is a native of Missouri who studied journalism at Winthrop University in South Carolina. She is also an alumna of the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.
Contact Kaitlyn at kaitlyn@themissouritimes.com.
