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Tieton Forest Collaborative Memorandum of Understanding Signing Ceremony
I am here today to celebrate the success of the Tieton Acquisition Project and even more to the point the Tieton Forest Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. Forest Service, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), Washington Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) and The Nature Conservancy.
We are here to make the point to ourselves and the world around us that state agencies can work together, they can work with non-profits and they can work with the federal government toward the common good.
We can be efficient, we can have a plan and carry it out and most importantly we can accomplish far more together than we could separately.
Natural Resource agencies receive less now than we ever have as a percentage of state budgets, and I am sure in the face of wars and hurricanes the same is true of federal agencies.
At the same time expectations for and responsibilities of our agencies continue to rise.
The only way around that equation is to work smarter. Working together is working smarter. We must share resources, knowledge, expertise, technologies and in the land management business we must take advantage of economies of scale. That's the concept behind the WDFW/WDNR land exchange and that's clearly the logic behind today's MOU.
The success of this effort is critical to WDFW because of the very high fish and wildlife benefits of this area combined with its great benefit to public recreation.
Our regional biological staff has identified this area as a priority for protection because of its incredible biological diversity. Protecting the project area provides great benefits to both fish and wildlife.
The Washington State Legislature biennially appropriates funds for critical fish and wildlife habitat. The Tieton project ranked number one in the state for this biennium for its benefits to fish and wildlife.
In Addition this project provides great public benefits:
One of the best features of the acquisition project has been the partnership aspect of it.
A keystone feature of this agreement is a successful private public partnership. Partnerships help agencies in a variety of ways. Shared funding and diverse expertise are but a few easily recognized benefits, but in addition partnerships help in a more fundamental way. It has been my experience that pubic agencies tend to become risk adverse in making management choices. Why? Because when decisions are made we become buffeted by countervailing opinions. All too often that leads to passive management approaches that tend to perpetuate problems not to solve them.
Partnerships and the collaborative approaches they engender can problem solve because countervailing opinions are sorted out at the table during decision making rather than after. Consequently, such processes can lead to active management decisions rather than the much safer passive management approaches. Active management leads to solving problems for the longer term and provides clear benefits to people and to fish and wildlife.
That legacy of partnership needs to continue as we transition from acquisition to management and restoration of the dry forest ecosystem. The landowners, the DNR, the U.S. Forest Service, WDFW and the Natural Conservancy will likely be neighbors for many years to come. Hopefully, the MOU we sign today will help ensure that we will not only be neighbors but partners in the restoration of this landscape to its ecological potential.
- May 17, 2006
Comments by WDFW Director Jeff Koenings
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