RE: Decisions Suited to Collaborative Efforts

[Sandra Kosek <skosek@umich.edu>]

Hi, my name is Sandra Kosek and I used to work for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (1992-1997). I was working with a group that had permitting authority for the state of Michigan. I have an anecdote to share about collaboration that some of you may find interesting.

Background: At that time, my unit started a collaboration with a number of municipal facilities that were discharging to an area that was under a TMDL. This was an effort on our part to encourage them to work on non-point source issues, which at the time were (still are?) not regulated. In that particular situation, there was a significant amount of NPS and it seemed to us to make much more sense to try and reduce that, since it would (in theory) be cheaper.

Thoughts on the process: We arranged for funding for an independent facilitator who was hired through a local environmental council. I believe that this helped tremendously in the initial phases of the agreement -- the municipalities seemed more inclined to trust that it wasn't some sort of bait-and-switch, and they also had an avenue through which to complain if they felt MDEQ wasn't operating in good faith (although given the permit situation, MDEQ definitely still had a big stick). This process went all the way to full voluntary agreement (it even had some signatures), before other stakeholders started coming out of the woodwork. Most notably EPA itself. This has sent the process into some wild gyrations, although I understand through the grapevine that it is not yet a total loss. The process had previously survived the entry of a new MDEQ stakeholder with a different viewpoint on the voluntary nature of the agreement (and the loss of the facilitator partway through, plus a lot of MDEQ staff turnover).

I think the problem here was largely that not all of the key stakeholders were brought in at appropriate times. However, I'm not sure the we could have brought them all in at the beginning -- it wasn't until the process was humming along that bigger players started getting interested. Perhaps because nobody thought we'd get that far (us or them) :). 

It was really touchy at the beginning. There's a lot of wariness at the regulated community level. Even in a case like this where there was support instead of additional wariness from the environmental council. This particular project may yet fail, but the ball rolled farther than we expected with a lot of good dialogue going on. It sure seemed to have reduced tension among the parties involved, if nothing else. Even if it fails, people know each other a little better.