RE: Decisions Suited to Collaborative Efforts

[Mary Durfee <mhdurfee@mtu.edu>]

I've been a member of an EPA-funded citizen stakeholder group for nearly five years, half of which I was the US co-chair.  The group, Lake Superior Binational Forum, advises the US, Canada, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ontarion on thier efforts to restore and protect Lake Superior. The group has been around a decade and existed for a few months before the government program began.  We select our own members, and this is one way we've addressed changing concerns in the Basin and brought in new stakeholders.  This message touches on a number of issues raised on July 16.

Canada and US fund our travel, lodging and food at our meetings, our budgets also each have money for part-time coordinators.  The coordinators do not work for the governments, but for the organization who handles our money--Northland College in the US and Lakehead University in Canada. The members of the Forum donate their time, and many members also donate their travels by simply not submitting requests.

Without the coordinators we surely would not still be around or be as effective as we sometimes are.  We meet five times a year around the basin, so they handle logistics.  In order to expand the number of people who participate in the Binational Program, and to educate ourselves, members organize at least one conference a year (our next one is forestry).  Our govt. funding supports the conference, but again the details of communication and logistics are handled by the coordinators. As co-chair I relied heavily on them to keep records, do the budgets, and get letters out, etc. The coordinators also did the actual writing of a Progress Report, though members wrote large chunks of it and all of us commented on it.  Ditto a video.

The Forum in its early years had problems before it that clearly were of great interest to the actual members--the setting of goals and levels for the reduction of some of the toxic substances in the basin.  The Forum set the loadings goals for mercury and PCBs...and there is considerable success. They also wrote and adopted a Vision for Lake Superior that all new members accept as a given and that governments have used in their planning.  I still like the Vision and we often refer to it when we try to discuss things with each other. It's general enough that we have plenty of disagreements, and hopeful enough that we can agree on it.   

After that highly contentious, but successful early citizen decision making, the Forum has had to move on to new issues.  It provided advice on various stages of the Lakewide Management Plan (LaMP).  Some of the materials in the LaMP are there because the Forum wanted it--and that has caused some discomfort for the agencies. For example, the Forum wanted a chapter on sustainability, but the agencies did not because they don't have mandates to manage for that. It went in and now it appears this may be the one area where the Forum and the government subcommittee will write it jointly in future versions of the LaMP.  That idea, by the way, seems to have come from the states after I had raised issues over the current content of the chapter on behalf of the Forum.

There was a period where the government agencies were working on the final stage of the LaMP and had nothing to show the Forum. During this nearly 3-yr time, the Forum very nearly fell apart due to lack of work.  Already it had committees on outreach and assorted issues associated with sustainability, so, naturally, that aspect of the Forum's interest grew. I came on and soon became chair at about this time.  The people who had worked so hard on chemicals started to drop off the Forum. They often went ON to other committees, typically inside their states, where real regulations and planning were going on.  We managed to stabilize the Forum by having the governments do some progress reports to us and by urging them to get something to the chemicals committee, which they did.  Thus, the core expertise of the remaining old hands remained, even as that committee of the Forum got new members.  That committee was ready to comment on the draft LaMP III, and they are working with government partners to bring new stakeholders to meetings designed to get at the remaining in-basin sources of mercury.  Meanwhile, a Foundation contact me about applying for a grant, which I sent on to our best grant writer (now the new US Co-chair, after term limits ended my time as chair). This was the first time we got non-government funds and it caused a bit of conflict.  We worked it out and, actually, the governments have made efforts to re-supply the now-expended foundation grant.  We used some of it for our own mini-grant program, and the governments liked that and have helped us continue it.

When the LaMP came out, both we and our EPA Lake Superior officer wanted to have an extensive outreach to the whole basin. He proposed a plan that had our support but t was killed for lack of money. Odd...millions on plans over a ten year period, but no plans by EPA or the states to celebrate it or explain it to others.  We did manage to organize and fund a small "LaMP tour" modeled on an earlier one coordinated by the Lake Superior Alliance, an environmental umbrella group. Forum members (and, as I recall, goverment players) came to both tours.  It was done hastily however.  The Canadians seemed to have done better for their side than the US did on its side.  I was unable to attend any of the US meetings, but went to two on the Canadian side (though my university donated the money to send me, because there was no funding to send Forum members on the tour, despite our years of effort on the LaMP--trust me, that did not go down well with the members).  

And now we don't quite know what will happen next.  The governments are revising and updating the LaMP, so we are commenting on it.  The government agencies and the Forum plan to have a joint work meeting in Novemeber to hammer out what we will each do.  The International Joint Commission specifically invited us to comment on a work plan for a upper lakes study that Congress approved, so maybe we will do something with them.  We've offered ourselves as a stakeholder group to Ontario's Living Legacy project, especially its heritage coast component, but have no definite response. So, I don't know whether we'll be around much longer or not.

There's a virtue in having new citizen groups, but it's nice to have groups with considerable expertise and "memory," too.  Of course, we have a better memory than our government partners it seems sometimes.  We get new Lake Superior and LaMP officers, especially from EPA, periodically and have to wait for them to come up to speed.  Plans get lost or dropped with new government people (and sometimes with new Forum people), so that uncertainty about our efforts is hard to deal with.  So far, we persevere and so do the governments.