Support of Land Management Agencies - A Western Region Perspective To: "A - Division Chief and Staff", "B - Branch Chiefs and Offices", "DC - All District Chiefs" cc: "Wendy E Norton, Program Analyst, Reston, VA" , "James G Peters, Acting Program Officer, Reston, VA" , "Joanne C Taylor, Secretary (Typing), Reston, VA" , "Janet N Arneson, Secretary (Typing), Reston, VA" Subject: Support of Land Management Agencies - A Western Region Perspective Date: Fri, 24 Nov 1995 12:04:22 -0500 From: "James G Peters, Acting Program Officer, Reston, VA" Recently, I received the following memo from John Conomos regarding USGS support (or non-support) of Land Management Agencies with our Federal Program funds. As I'm sure you're aware, this issue is gaining importance for us. The NBS has a formal process in place for directly soliciting input from other agencies in DOI in establishing their priorities for spending their appropriated funds. Not surprisingly, this idea is very popular with the other agencies; they would like to see more effort from USGS in this regard. Also, NMD and GD have examples of this type of direct solicitation process, albeit on a smaller scale (A-16, minerals program.) But currently, WRD has no such process; NAWQA (and other programs) certainly solicit input from other agencies, but we're hard pressed to show that the input directly establishes our priorities. A knee-jerk response to this situation might be for WRD to try to stretch the definition of "support" to make our efforts look more significant than they might otherwise be. But the Western Region suggests otherwise. As we are now developing documentation on WRD's support for other agencies within DOI (and the Forest Service), your thoughts on Western Region's position would be much appreciated. Thanks.... P.S. We appreciate the many examples of support for land mgmt. agencies that we've received in the past few days. The reason I've asked our field offices to hold up on doing anything additional is that the Director's office is looking for more quantitative information of funding, number of reports, etc. We'vre trying to see how much of this infromation we can put together here at Headquarters. With luck we can substantially reduce the work required for the Regions and Districts. So please stand by on this one. Here's the Western Region's memo..... Water Resources Division Western Region 345 Middlefield Road, Mail Stop 470 Menlo Park, California 94025 November 21, 1995 MEMORANDUM To: Acting Program Officer Water Resources Division From: T. John Conomos Regional Hydrologist Subject: Support of Land Management Agencies in Department of the Interior We offer a word of caution about how hard the Division tries to erase the misconception that USGS is an isolated Bureau within the Department that does not adequately support its sister land management agencies (LMAs). We do not think it is all misconception, particularly for WRD. There is, in our opinion, a very real inadequacy in WRD's support of LMAs. Although we cannot speak authoritatively for GD or NMD, we do have the perception that they are performing considerably better than WRD in supporting sister LMAs with their own funds. This challenge by Secretary Babbitt might be a unique opportunity for WRD to admit it has a problem (not of its own making), and thereby obtain both the Bureau and Departmental support for an initiative to fund more WRD support of the LMAs. Western Region has been preaching the need for such an initiative for 2 years, mostly because of emerging issues in the West. The Federal agencies in the West are turning en masse to the pay-to-play concept, and WRD has stepped to the table in a penny-ante fashion (No one need be offended by the analogy, because we did not create our situation.). Examples where we have not been, or will not be able to respond adequately, include the President's Forest Plan, the Eastside Ecosystem Assessment (now called the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project), Kesterson Reservoir (past and present issues), NAFTA, and some aspects of the Lower Colorado. We are fully aware that if an initiative goes forward to support LMAs, it will come from existing programs. We believe that WRD's deficiency in support to them is so great that we must find a funding mechanism. If we do not, we will dig an ever deeper hole with the LMAs, and the hydrology work will go elsewhere. We support the effort to document what we are doing in support of the LMAs, but fear that might be overdone. We propose that we demonstrate what we are doing well, admit our failures, explain why we have the problem, and seek Bureau and Departmental support for an initiative solution. ------- End of Forwarded Message