Lake Champlain Basin Program Interview:
MICHAELA STICKNEY

One of the things that distinguishes the Lake Champlain Basin Program is that cultural heritage protection and recreation enhancement are core elements of the program, it does not just address water quality issues. In the early days of the program, while the planning was being developed—I have a copy of it here, this is the 20-year management plan for Lake Champlain—there were many disagreements between the states of Vermont and New York and the province of Quebec over who had more responsibility for reducing phosphorus, who had more responsibility for toxic pollution. But when it came to cultural heritage protection and recreation enhancement, there were never any arguments about that, everyone agreed. By including it, it allowed for common ground. It helped build trust among the stakeholders. It was really neutral territory which made the whole process better.

What we found in the most recent years is that the projects become more and more integrated, for example, we have a really well known project that’s studying zebra mussels, but it’s studying what impact do the zebra mussels have on the historic shipwrecks. I don’t know if you realize that Lake Champlain has the best collection of underwater shipwrecks in North America, the best preserved and the most extensive. We actually have an underwater scuba diving park managed jointly by Vermont and New York. There are seven sites spread out all over the lake called the Underwater Preserve, which are managed by the state of Vermont, but there are some new sites planned for development on the New York side of the lake. This is really a unique project and some of the sites are referenced in here.

So education outreach is one of the major segments of the program. We also have grant making and that’s summarized partially. The basin program actually implements eight different types of grants ranging from outreach to pollution prevention. There are a lot of implementation projects. Then we have bikeways for creating cultural heritage bike loops to boost local tourism. We have a partnership program which gives grants of up to $5,000 to groups that will partner with each other to implement, build parks in municipal areas along the river, and protect shoreline areas. In the last few years, we’ve given out 325 grants totaling $1.5 million within the Basin. It’s been very extensive and we’ve seen a lot of really positive results. And again, we don’t want to do all the work, we want to partner with other groups and allow them to do the work so they feel ownership with it.

WHERE ARE YOU GETTING THE MONEY FOR THE GRANTS? FROM THE DIFFERENT STATES?

The money for these grants comes directly from the USEPA, however, other aspects of the program are funded through the US Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric, National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service. We have a real network with other federal entities where we’ll partner on research. And actually, one of the reasons I wanted to meet in the library here was to show you each one of these reports is a different research grant. And these are publications from what we call demonstration projects, separate from any of the grants. Grants are really focused on the nonprofits in the region, municipal groups, citizens groups, and the museum.

HOW DID YOU INSURE THAT YOUR GOALS REFLECT REAL NEEDS?

You can find information about our goals and how we chose them by looking at our website.

If I could talk just a moment about the management plan. This was developed through a very extensive public process. There were about 40 public meetings to discuss this. There was an earlier version of a plan that was mailed out to anyone in the Basin who wanted one. We made a point of when we developed the opportunities for action, we didn’t set priorities ourselves, we wanted to be guided by what people in the basin thought. People were a little bit concerned, how can we possibly do this, and our message was, "You tell us. We’re here to serve you, we don’t want to tell you what your priorities are."

We came up with an evolving plan for the future of Lake Champlain to make the point that this plan is not etched in stone. It’s not a fixed plan. We built in over the 20 years, every five years of the review to determine do we need to change things in the plan. In fact, as one tool to get there we have an annual project report where we evaluate ourselves. Are we doing what we said we would do in this plan? We go through all the different sections looking at phosphorus, toxic pollution, aquatic nuisance species, human health, fish and wildlife, cultural/recreational resources, and if we are meeting our targets in these areas then are we doing a good job in performing our role with the public?.

We have just come up with this year’s draft which will be available in August. This is something we’ll mail out. We print about 4,000 of these a year and distribute them extensively. Then we have public meetings every year to talk about it and say this is what we did and this is how close we are to what is in the plan, what do you think? I expect in 2001, which is our first five-year review, that we’ll need to tinker a little bit with some things.

ARE YOU CLOSE SO FAR TO THE GOALS YOU SET?

Yes, within the first five years, especially in terms of phosphorus reduction. This plan resulted in a phosphorus reduction agreement signed between the states of Vermont and New York, where they committed to reaching certain targets within their state to reduce phosphorus pollution to the lake. Right now we’re working on getting an agreement with Quebec, which is expected to be signed some time in the next few months.

What we’ve found in terms of phosphorus commitment is we exceeded by more than half the first five years. However, we’ve done all the easy fixes, even though millions of dollars were spent. What we’re realizing is that the urban factor was underestimated. When this plan was developed, the land use category that we call urban development was such a small part of the watershed, we didn’t think too much of it.

Since this plan was signed in 1996, we funded a series of studies looking at urban development and phosphorus from urban runoff and found out that it’s a much bigger problem than we realized. We need to re-factor that into this equation saying, if we rely on existing programs this can’t be done. So we need to look ahead and get the programs into place. It demonstrates the evolving aspect of this.

WHEN WAS YOUR ORGANIZATION FOUNDED AND HOW DID IT EVOLVE?

It was formed by an act of Congress in 1990. It was something that Senator Leahy worked on it was called the Lake Champlain Special Designation Act. It actually created the Lake Champlain Basin Pro-gram and designated that the program would be funded primarily by the EPA. It determined that it would use a multiple stakeholder approach, use a very integrated management approach that incorporated water quality with aquatic nuisance species, human health, fish and wildlife and then cultural heritage and recreational enhancement.

WHEN THE ORGANIZATION WAS FIRST SET UP WHAT DIFFICULTIES DID YOU FACE?

I think of the difficulties of working with two states and two countries. It hasn’t been done that often. There are some major differences between the states in terms of how their state offices function. It took some time to build common ground, to build trust. Because the basin is so large, there’s an awful lot of travelling around so there were some difficulties. The Basin Program has made a real point of hosting steering committee meetings in different locations.

I think that ultimately things have worked out in terms of an operating structure. I printed out a couple of figures. I submitted an article to the International Journal of Lake and Water Management about the program, which is due to come out any time now. This shows the overall operating structure of the program. Just getting the right balance… You’ll see on the steering committee, which guides the program, this is the program in the middle, it’s sort of the bread and butter of the program keeping things going, we’re staff and we’re leaders at the same time because we’re giving guidance to the steering committee.

You can see we have state members from both states, we have national level (US Fish & Wildlife, De-partment of Ag., EPA) and then we balance this with local representation. We have three committees, the CACs are Citizen Advisory Committees. We have one for Vermont and New York and Quebec, we have a technical advisory committee, and then we have Quebec here. I think one of the things we’ll see shifting in the future is actually to break up the state dominance of the steering committee. Saying well, we had to write this plan so we needed these people on, but now don’t we need more local representatives?

HOW DO YOU ENSURE PUBLIC PARTICIPATION?

Partially through our operating structure. We have a steering committee meeting four times per year. The rest of the committees are meeting regularly, and we have a technical advisory committee. They focus on the research, the work plans for the research. It involves the University state experts, private researchers, government agencies. They work closely with the Lake Champlain Research Consortium, they’re an independent group. They figure into decisions our steering committee makes.

This is a very open process, and that’s been its real strength. It’s very open, it’s takes longer, but people in the basin feel a greater sense of ownership and they feel invested in the process. Therefore, they support this plan. It was part of the intention. We may take longer, but we'll have more lasting results and greater buy-in to the plan because people were involved. We also have an education-outreach committee linked with the citizen advisory committee.

The committees are different in Vermont, New York, and Quebec. In Vermont, this committee was created by our legislature in 1988 before the Basin Program existed. They’re appointed by the governor and they actually have a budget. In New York, it’s more of an ad hoc group, and in Quebec it’s definitely an ad hoc group but with close ties to the Ministry of Environment. So we three very different, free rolling entities that have very strong voices on the steering committee. These three have a lot of influence over the rest of the group.

SO THE CHAIRPERSON OF THE VT, NY AND QUEBEC COMMITTEES ARE ON THE STEER-ING COMMITTEE?

Yes, and then we have a Quebec Ministry person. We recently were talking about how open this process has been. We involve all these groups in our budget-making process. When the most recent edition of our newsletter was written, the budget was still in the process of being developed. We involved about 120 people in determining how to use our budget, think about that. Why do we do that? Because we’re giving a lot of grants, because we’re doing research, we want to know what do people think.