Applegate Partnership

Location

Southwest Oregon

Case description

The idea for the Applegate Partnership was born in the minds of two unlikely collaborators, Jack Shipley, an avid environmentalist, and Jim Neal, a long-time logger from Redmond, Oregon and co-director of the Aerial Forest Management Foundation. Together these two men, frustrated with the polarization of resource management issues in their valley and not willing to accept gridlock, decided that it was worth a try to get together and hash out issues face to face. The result has been a very successful community-based partnership.

In the summer of 1992, Shipley and Neal decided to begin discussing with others their ideas for a “different approach to managing the half million-acre Applegate watershed.” Located in southwest Oregon and northern California, the Applegate Watershed includes Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), state, county, and private lands. Shipley and Neal wrote a short white paper outlining basic tenets of their plan, such as responsible extraction, no clearcuts and no pesticides. Shipley solicited comments from environmental groups and natural resource agencies (mainly the Forest Service and the BLM) and Neal similarly approached industry interests.

Surprisingly, what they found was that there was considerable overlap between the desires and interests of the environmental groups and the industry groups, centered on maintaining the long-term health of the watershed and stability of local economies. Encouraged by this apparent common ground, Shipley and Neal organized a meeting in October 1992 with neighbors, representatives from industry, community groups, the BLM, the Forest Service, and several local environmental organizations to discuss a plan to make the Applegate Watershed a demonstration site for ecologically and financially responsible resource management.

Not wasting any time, this 60-person group elected a Board of Directors, members of which were nominated based on their willingness to “work toward solutions, leave partisanship at home, put ecosystem health in front of private agendas, and have the time to participate” in meetings. The group crafted the following vision statement for the Applegate Partnership at the first meeting and, over a decade later, it still guides the group:

The Applegate Partnership is a community-based project involving industry, conservation groups, natural resource agencies, and residents cooperating to encourage and facilitate the use of natural resource principles that promote ecosystem health and diversity.

Through community involvement and education, this partnership supports management of all land within the watershed in a manner that sustains natural resources and that will, in turn, contribute to economic and community stability within the Applegate Valley.

In addition to developing a vision statement, the board developed three core philosophical principles to guide the day-to-day operation of the Partnership. According to a Partnership publication, Applegate Partnership: Practice Trust – Them is Us, the purpose of the Partnership was to make “future land management in the Applegate Watershed ecologically credible, aesthetically acceptable, and economically viable.” The Board of Directors agreed that the Partnership would:

• Provide leadership in facilitating the use of natural resource principles that promote ecosystem health and natural diversity;

• Work with public land managers, private landowners, and community members to promote projects, which demonstrate ecologically sound management practices within the watershed; and

• Seek support for these projects through community involvement and education.

The Partnership also spent considerable time and energy working on developing trust and respect among the participants. “We were dealing here with arch enemies who in the past had only met across a courtroom,” noted Su Rolle, the first Interagency Liaison for the Forest Service and BLM to the Applegate Partnership. Today, the Partnership has inspired greater community identity through its widely distributed newsletter, The Applegator, and has strengthened community capacity to deal with economic and environmental problems in the valley through economic forums, workshops, and task groups focused on diverse issues like fire control and economic development and reinvestment. Because of these achievements and the fact that the community’s culture and economy has long been associated with the use of forest resources, the Applegate was selected as one of ten Adaptive Management Areas (AMAs) created under former President Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan.

Predictably, over the Partnership’s ten-year history the group has undergone considerable structural changes and experienced a great deal of organizational learning. A testimony to the Partnership’s compelling vision and the commitment of its members, the group’s seventeen-member Board of Directors continues to meet twice a month in addition to sponsoring numerous other activities such as field trips and neighborhood presentations. The first meeting each month is a public forum for community members to discuss issues and voice concerns, while the second meeting is an executive session for the Partnership’s board to discuss public comments and to manage the internal affairs of the group.

The Applegate Partnership has made significant advances to address the region’s ecological, economic, and social challenges. Early on, the group spearheaded initiatives such as a local community assessment to better understand the watershed’s social and economic attributes and values as well as ecological assessments of the valley’s many sub-watersheds. In order to better understand and communicate watershed-wide information and trends, the Partnership worked with others to merge multiple GIS databases from federal, state, county, and private lands to create a comprehensive GIS for the Applegate Valley – a powerful visual tool that has strengthened community identity and served as an analytical tool for decision-making.

The Partnership has formed the Applegate River Watershed Council (ARWC), which, according to Shipley, is the “implementing arm of the Partnership.” The ARWC – which has its own facilities and five full-time staff – was established in order to be eligible to receive funding from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, a state agency that provides funds and information to watershed councils throughout Oregon. The ARWC’s own five-member board of directors work as a sub-committee of the Partnership’s seventeen-member board. This sub-committee meets regularly to make management decisions for ARWC staff, including which projects to pursue and how to allocate funds. While the Partnership as a whole focuses on public and private land management, the ARWC works exclusively on restoration of private lands and environmental education and outreach.

Another key distinction between the Partnership and the ARWC is that the ARWC, with its full time staff including a coordinator and monitoring and restoration professionals, has the capacity to administer on-the-ground projects, whereas members of the Partnership itself are volunteers who lack the time or necessary skills for long-term projects involving restoration and monitoring. Commenting on the strength of the relationship between these two entities, ARWC Coordinator Daniel Newberry stressed that the Partnership has provided a critical sounding board for community needs. However, he notes, “like anything else, you can only do so much if you have a volunteer Board of Directors. Unless you want to quit your job and work full time for free, you want to hire people who have professional experience…to do the on-the-ground work.”

Current Partnership Initiatives

More recently, the Partnership has launched four major initiatives: a community fire plan, a dam removal and river restoration project, a pilot study to merge the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Clean Water Act (CWA), and some long-term aquatic monitoring initiatives.

With federal funding for localized fire planning through the National Fire Plan, the Partnership developed a Community Fire Plan for the valley – a strategic plan that discusses the region’s fire history and presents strategies that agencies, community members and local landowners can employ to minimize the threat of catastrophic fire in the valley. The plan pulls together data from dozens of organizations in the valley involved in fire management and prevention into one document that serves as a strategic guide for organizations to coordinate projects and more effectively address fire hazards.

The Partnership has also spearheaded a major aquatic restoration project involving the removal of two irrigation dams on the Little Applegate River, a tributary to the Applegate. The dams are over 100 years old and have historically been used to irrigate approximately 1,200 acres of land owned by over forty property owners. Each year, water withdrawals dewatered the Little Applegate in late summer, which eliminated spawning habitat for endangered salmonids. Over a five-year period, members of the Partnership spoke with property owners to find out if they would be willing to replace their irrigation water from the Little Applegate with water pumped in from the main stem of the Applegate. Eventually, after several face-to-face conversations and creative fund-raising, all irrigators agreed to switch to the main stem. The conversion is still underway and when complete will open up 37 miles of viable salmonids habitat along the Little Applegate. A testimony to the collaborative, bridge-building work of the Partnership, this $2.5 million project is being funded by several organizations including $600,000 from the Natural Resource Conservation Service’s EQIP Program, $500,000 from the Forest Service, $100,000 from the World Wildlife Fund, and additional support from other agencies such as the Oregon Department of Ecology and EPA, as well as fishing equipment companies. According to Newberry, one of the secrets to bringing together such a large group to fund the effort was to involve as many organizations as possible in the early conceptualization of the project. He noted that a number of the agencies who have or will be providing funds for the project were heavily involved in the planning phases of the project from day one. Moreover, Partnership members took advantage of the fundraising expertise of the Portland-based non-profit Oregon Water Trust. This group helped write grants for the project and was also instrumental in convincing the Oregon Congressional delegation to make possible the $500,000 contribution from the Forest Service.

Due to the community capacity in the valley, the Applegate Partnership was selected by EPA, the Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and other federal and state agencies to be one of ten projects across the country to explore conservation opportunities afforded through the integration of the ESA and CWA. According to Shipley, landowners often have difficulty navigating the complexity of federal laws to determine what they can and cannot do on their property, a problem that is compounded when landowners must comply with multiple federal and state environmental laws. To address this problem, the Partnership worked with faculty at Lewis and Clark Law School to research areas where the two acts overlap and to develop conservation strategies that address the two goals of the acts: clean water and biodiversity protection. With their research complete, the group developed a user-friendly manual for private landowners in the watershed that features a comprehensive list of voluntary activities landowners can follow to protect endangered species and clean water. For example, if a rancher needs stream access for cattle, he or she can use the manual to learn how to properly maintain vegetation along the stream bank, an action that will address both water temperature and filtration concerns under the ESA and CWA. In conjunction with the user-manual, the Partnership has also worked with Environmental Defense to develop a program to indemnify landowners for a period of time for taking steps to improve habitat for salmonids on their land. This program was modeled after ED’s Safe Harbor Program for the Red Cockaded Woodpecker.

An Emphasis on Monitoring

Another strength of the Applegate Partnership has been the group’s strong emphasis on aquatic monitoring as a critical element to advance the goals of the Partnership. The monitoring program is administered by the ARWC, which, since its founding, has been heavily focused on stream restoration to improve habitat for endangered salmonids and water quality. Given this focus, the ARWC recognized early on the need to develop solid baseline data for core constituents of water quality including temperature, dissolved oxygen, and stream flow. By tracking these constituents over time, ARWC will be better able to determine whether or not their restoration initiatives are having a beneficial effect.

In 1997, the ARWC received funding to monitor water quality in the Applegate River and its tributaries through the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), in order to collect baseline information to develop a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) for the Applegate basin. With this support and additional funding from restoration grants, the ARWC has been able to maintain a state of the art water quality monitoring lab and several water chemistry and temperature-monitoring sites. Mike Mathews, ARWC Monitoring Coordinator, noted that recent monitoring initiatives have served two immediate purposes: they allowed DEQ to develop TMDLs for the basin and list impaired water bodies and, moreover, has provided a “logic foundation to base restoration plans on.” Mathews noted that collecting this information over time will help them identify water quality trends useful to defining progress. Until now, identifying trends in water quality has been difficult because much of the data collected in the past has not been standardized or brought under one roof. He emphasized that the ARWC has invested considerable time in making data collection methods consistent such as testing the same sites year after year and applying uniform sampling methods so that, in a few years, the group can analyze trends in water quality and have confidence that they are scientifically robust and sound.

In addition to collecting baseline information for the Applegate River and tributaries, the ARWC is monitoring the impact of specific restoration initiatives to learn from these initiatives and adapt future activities accordingly. Newberry stressed that monitoring is essential for accountability, “an issue that comes up over and over again when you talk about restoration projects [is whether] you are throwing your money [away] or is it really doing some good long-term. It’s not an easy question to answer and the only way you can answer it is by having some real formal monitoring going on year after year to determine what your success is.” With this in mind, Newberry highlighted the two forms of monitoring involved in ARWC’s riparian planting monitoring program: implementation and effectiveness monitoring. The implementation monitoring component of the project involves setting milestones each year such as planting vegetation buffers along a certain percentage of streams and then determining whether those milestones were met. He contrasts this type of monitoring with effectiveness monitoring which, in the riparian example highlighted above, involves ARWC staff returning to sample plots year after year to measure the survival and growth rate of restoration plantings.

A major strength of the ARWC’s aquatic monitoring initiative is that the information is being used to advance the goals of the Applegate Partnership in general which involve not only improving resource management, but enhancing support for these initiatives through community outreach. With new information, the ARWC has been able to pinpoint areas for restoration action such as hotspots of poor water quality, while also using the data to communicate the state of the watershed to the public. Indeed, ARWC staff have used the information in a number of conferences to discuss the health of the streams in the watershed and have also made local presentations to neighborhoods and individual landowners to communicate problems affecting local streams and some of the steps local landowners can take to fix them. During these meetings, community members have also been able to communicate areas of concern in their own neighborhoods such as leaking septic tanks, which has helped the ARWC identify new areas to monitor and carry out restoration activities. According to Mathews, “the information is being used to establish restoration priorities in the basin…It points us in the direction of where we want to go.”

In addition to their work on aquatic monitoring, the ARWC has also taken significant steps to organize monitoring data from state and federal agencies into the Partnership’s watershed GIS map. According to Shipley, “if you came in tomorrow and were looking for certain data on the Applegate, you would have to go to the BLM, the Forest Service, ODF, EPA, DEQ, and on and on. Everybody has a piece of it. There is not a place where all the data is kept together, where it is actually being used as a management tool.” With all the information stored together, the GIS map can serve as a shared database of information for all parties active in the Applegate, enabling them to make more integrated, landscape-scale management decisions. For example, the GIS system will allow parties to ask questions like: where are salmon laying their eggs and is the aquatic habitat along those stream segments healthy? With this kind of information readily accessible, all parties in the basin – including the ARWC, private landowners, and resource agencies – can be more strategic about where to act to address common goals. A testimony to the ARWC’s path-breaking work, adjacent watersheds are looking at the group’s watershed monitoring program and GIS system for insight to find ways to structure and coordinate an information database across the entire Rogue River Basin, the major river system in southern Oregon.

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.