LITTLE ROCK—Arkansas’ $29.5 million agreement with a natural gas firm that wants to drill on more than 11,500 acres of state wildlife area faces criticism and questions from environmental groups concerned about the impact that drilling will have on water and animals.

Some of the state’s top conservation groups complained that they were caught off-guard by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s decision this week to lease land in two wildlife management areas to Chesapeake Energy Corp. for natural gas exploration. The deal is the company’s largest mineral-rights lease ever in Arkansas.

“We’re quite alarmed by it and we have a lot of questions we need answered,” said Jack Blackstone, executive director of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation. “This is a very sensitive wildlife area that we have signed these contracts for.”

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission voted Monday to accept the terms of the leases with Chesapeake Energy Corp. in the Gulf Mountain and Petit Jean River wildlife management areas after taking bids on the opportunity to explore the lands. The leases will allow the Oklahoma City-based company to have access to more than 7,500 acres at Petit Jean River WMA in Yell County and nearly 4,000 acres at Gulf Mountain WMA in Van Buren County.

The leases also entitle the commission to a 20-percent royalty on any natural gas pumped from the sites.

Officials with the Arkansas Wildlife Federation, Audubon Arkansas and the Sierra Club said they were surprised by the move and weren’t included in any discussions leading up to the vote to open a large swatch of public wildlife areas for natural gas exploration. They also said they had questions about how many wells Chesapeake plans to drill in the area and what impact the exploration and drilling will have on the water and wildlife in the region.

Kate Althoff of the Sierra Club said the group’s greatest concern is the impact the drilling will have on water in the wildlife areas.

“It’s not about noise scaring away wildlife,” said Althoff, chairwoman of the Sierra Club’s Central Arkansas group. “It’s about permanently altering an ecosystem that’s supposed to be managed in the interest of the ecosystem.”

Namely, Althoff said the Sierra Club is concerned about where the large amounts of water needed for natural gas drilling will come from and whether any water will be used from either of the wildlife areas. She said the group is also concerned about what will happen with that water after it is used in the drilling process.

Leases for both management areas spell out restrictions on Chesapeake’s drilling, including a prohibition on drilling during hunting seasons. Other limits include a restriction on drilling within 500 feet of any stream, wetland or body of water or within 330 feet of any area of historic value.

Gov. Mike Beebe and Game and Fish officials say the state will make sure that the wildlife areas are protected and not damaged by the group’s drilling, but the conservation groups say they had no input on the deal. The commission didn’t hear any objections to the lease agreement when it voted unanimously to approve the proposal at a special meeting Monday.

The commission had issued a public notice the previous Friday of the meeting to consider the lease agreement.

Ken Smith, state director of Audubon Arkansas, said he didn’t think the public had enough input on the decision beforehand and said it caught his group by surprise.

“These are public lands. It seems to me that the public has an important role in what goes on with public lands,” Smith said.

Loren Hitchcock, the Game and Fish Commission’s deputy director, said he believed the public was given adequate notice about the meeting and that the panel had been discussing for some time the possibility of leasing public lands for natural gas drilling. The agency said in 2006 that it was accepting proposals for mineral exploration and production on 17 commission-owned lands.

“It’s not something we were trying to hide,” Hitchcock said.

Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said Wednesday that the governor believed there had been sufficient opportunity for the public to provide input on the proposed lease of the wildlife areas.

The leases also provide drilling guidelines and instruct the company to follow a “best management practices” on drilling for natural gas without harming the environment.

Hitchcock has said the commission will work with the company to make sure roads aren’t built unnecessarily through large wooded tracts when drilling crews could use frontage areas or already existing roads.