Applegate Partnership

Location

Southwest Oregon

What challenges were faced and how were they overcome?

Over the Partnership’s ten-year history, group members have confronted numerous challenges. Shipley recalled that before the Partnership began, nobody knew what collaboration looked like, “we have kind of bumbled through in the last decade by hook and crook…we are all learning.” Perhaps one of the strongest traits of the group is that when faced with a significant challenge that might fracture the group, members continue to work to resolve it, being driven by an internal belief that they are better off working together than apart.

Consensus decision-making has both benefited and challenged the group. It has given board members veto power over group proposals, which has strengthened the group’s resolve to seek common ground and has inspired creative problem solving. Shipley noted that early in the group’s history, consensus decision-making helped the Partnership overcome concerns over power imbalances, particularly between industry and the agencies. He noted, “when we first began this process, the environmental community railed at us believing we would be co-opted by the industry or the agencies.” While consensus decision-making has been possible on many issues, there have been times where full agreement has not been possible. Recognizing this reality, Partnership members are seeking ways to balance the need to maintain the group’s open and inclusive decision-making processes, while still moving forward to make decisions despite disagreement. The group is currently considering proposals to shift decision-making at times from consensus, to near-consensus, or a supra-majority. As Shipley explained, “we can’t be held up by somebody who wants to hardball a particular issue.”

Another challenge facing the Applegate Partnership and the AWRC is the need to procure sufficient funds to support ongoing monitoring initiatives. DEQ’s TMDL process is ending and, consequently, the AWRC’s monitoring dollars are beginning to dry up. Newberry stressed that raising money for monitoring is particularly difficult because “[funders] like to say we were responsible for fixing this problem or removing this dam. But if you say monitoring, what did that get you?” He continued, “You have a grant for two years, and when it’s done, it’s done. [The funders] want the project finished, and yet they want it monitored, [but] by then there’s no funding to do the monitoring.” Echoing Newberry’s concern, Mathews noted that monitoring is usually “first on the chopping block for budget cuts because it is not directly related to getting a project implemented.” Given increasingly limited funding to support the AWRC’s monitoring work, the group is shifting to “maintenance monitoring,” which involves scaling back monitoring efforts at various stations and choosing, for example, ten key sites to continue to monitor in order to develop and analyze trends over time. In addition to maintenance monitoring, the AWRC plans to continue to perform implementation and effectiveness monitoring for its ongoing restoration projects and to more directly incorporate funding mechanisms for monitoring into their restoration project proposals.

Continuity in the Partnership has been difficult to sustain over time. While several key people have been involved in the Partnership since the beginning, there have nonetheless been changes in the culture of the Applegate Valley and membership in the Partnership. According to Shipley, the group has not always paid sufficient attention to helping new members of the Partnership develop a “historical perspective of what has occurred [in the Partnership] over time and…subsequently, as new people come in they don’t have the benefit of the trials and tribulations we’ve been through in the early years… there is this lack of connectivity to those things we have done together.”

Perhaps the greatest challenge to group cohesiveness has been integrating the Forest Service and the BLM – the largest landowners in the valley – into the partnership process. After the Clinton Administration’s Northwest Forest Plan was challenged under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), high level agency officials forced local agency staff to resign from the Partnership’s board and government lawyers recommended that agency staff stop attending regular meetings. According to current Applegate AMA Coordinator John Gerritsma, “it has been a struggle ever since to try to find some real meaning for how the partnership should operate.” District Ranger Connelly seconded Gerritsma’s concern, “there have been struggles as far as what is the relationship between the Forest Service and the Partnership…we know we want to work together, we know they have expectations, we have expectations, we want to achieve greater things together, but something is not working.” With this in mind, Gerritsma has proposed to formalize the relationship between the agencies and the Partnership, suggesting the Partnership could serve as a Federal Advisory Committee to the agencies.

A continuing source of conflict between the Partnership and the agencies is the degree of influence of the Partnership in public lands decision-making. According to Connelly, “Some in the partnership would like to have a stronger say as far as making decisions. But it’s up to me as a line officer to ultimately make decisions…they would like to have decision-making more in the hands of the public.” Shipley lamented that, “A lot of the outreach from the institutional folks is that ‘well we are doing NEPA, there’s a comment period.’ We are saying, ‘no thank you, we are talking about something much deeper than that’.” He stressed that, in the past, relations between the Partnership and the agencies were stronger because the parties shared a long history together and it was that shared history that kept agencies coming to Partnership meetings even after they formally withdrew from the Partnership. He believes that today, because of the threat of FACA violations, agencies are less comfortable working within the Partnership’s informal structure; a situation made worse because, as agency staff have turned over, individuals now lack that shared history and understanding that once was the glue for collaboration.

The deterioration of the relationship between the federal agencies and members of the Partnership is, to some extent, a bi-product of agency downsizing. After Rolle retired, the group was without a consistent liaison or AMA coordinator for over two years. According to Shipley, “this was a strong message back to the community that this AMA business isn’t very important.” Today, only one agency representative has remained with the Partnership since the beginning, which Shipley indicated, “takes a huge toll on the community, particularly in that we are doing all this work as volunteers.” Commenting on the agencies’ revolving door, he noted, “we can’t afford to keep retraining agency people. Our expectation of the agencies is that they are astute enough to know we’ve got an active community organization and when these new people come in that they have some understanding of our process and are open to it. That’s not the case. It’s almost like their decisions are made in a black box. I’m sounding cynical and I am. I’m angry.” Shipley noted that over eight years ago the Partnership drafted a formal petition signed by over 1000 local citizens asking that the agencies try to accomplish specific goals, such as: identifying different measures of success for the Forest Service besides the volume of board feet harvested and implementing fire prevention measures on a certain percentage of lands in the Applegate basin. Today, according to Shipley, “Nobody knows about these goals and none of those things have occurred…Part of the difficulty we are having as an organization is that with rotating leadership, there is no continuity…[t]here is no corporate memory within the agencies.”

Gerritsma acknowledged the lack of continuity with the partnership, and noted, “[When we did have somebody [temporarily] in the position, [they were] a detailer…a band aid really…and that definitely contributed to the declining relationships between the Partnership and the agencies.” With Gerritsma permanently on board as AMA coordinator, members of the Partnership are optimistic about rebuilding relationships with federal agencies in the valley. Considerable uncertainty remains, however, about what this relationship will entail because, as Gerritsma noted, “My position here is more than a partnership liaison and sometimes the members of the Partnership forget that. I try to effectively implement the intent of the AMA between the BLM and the Forest Service and that’s my primary job. It is because of the community involvement component of the AMA that I have become the liaison to the Partnership and to any other partnerships or community groups.”

Shipley believes that the agencies are more cautious about engaging in the Partnership because the new AMA Coordinator and interagency liaison to the Partnership has much less decision-making authority than Su Rolle, the former liaison. Before becoming the AMA coordinator and liaison to the partnership, Rolle was the District Ranger for the Applegate Ranger District so she had the same decision-making authority as other agency line officers in the valley. After Rolle retired, the agencies restructured and downgraded the AMA Coordinator position to a lower level than other line officers which, according to Shipley, “makes a huge difference in terms of what gets done because…John [Gerritsma] is beholden to all the line officers and is accountable to them and that makes a real different relationship.” Shipley stressed that the community lost a great deal of influence when the agencies downgraded the AMA Coordinator position, and this action was interpreted by the community as a clear message that the AMA concept was not a serious initiative.

Recognizing the need to improve the relationship between the Partnership and the agencies, both parties are taking constructive steps to build new bridges between them. In addition to the Federal Advisory Committee proposal that the Partnership is considering, the Forest Service itself is looking into new proposals for greater collaboration that may entail involving Partnership members earlier in federal resource planning processes. Connelly stressed that the Partnership wants “greater focus or better communication of what our focus is [because] sometimes our work appears piecemeal. They want us to provide longer term, larger scale planning…to look at the watershed and plan what are all the projects we might be doing rather than only looking at the timber projects and our wildlife projects which are scattered all about.” The recent completion of the Community Fire Plan has also helped mend fractured relationships between the Partnership and the agencies. Indeed, Gerritsma remarked that there appears to be considerable opportunities for cooperative planning associated with fire management in the valley, and noted, “there is a lot of emphasis right now on trying to coordinate across the boundary kind of planning…so that we [agencies and private parties] can get the same thinning contractor, for example, which is cheaper.”

This site was developed by the Ecosystem Management Initiative through a partnership with the US Forest Service and the US Department of Interior. Read more