(Collaborative Planning Continued from Page 1)
Recognizing Common Interests
In the summer of 2003, CLUE and the Extension agent talked about getting widespread community input into the process of creating the natural resources element of the comprehensive plan, because of the importance of natural resources in the community. Ashland County is the home of the Great Divide, where waters flow North to Lake Superior, and South to join the Mississippi . Ashland County is fortunate to have 157 lakes and 548 miles of rivers and streams, including 257 miles of trout streams, and 121 miles of Lake Superior shoreline (NLCD, 2004). These waters are protected and enhanced by 170,000 acres of wetlands (Kindt, 1999) and 525,749 acres of forested land (USFS, 2003). Ashland County is about 81% forested of which portions are divided among National Forest, the Bad River Reservation, County, and privately-owned.
 There was a county-wide meeting held in October where natural resources was the primary focus. There were a few presentations followed by a discussion among community members, which was facilitated by the planning consultant. At least one participant wanted to learn more about the county's forest plan and the Bad River 's Integrated Management plan to ensure that the resulting comprehensive plan did not conflict with other organizations' plans. In addition, many people wanted to learn more about the natural resources within their community. Prior to the October meeting CLUE had already agreed to prepare two natural resource papers – one to focus on forests and the other on water. The only reason that CLUE became involved was because of a federal grant they had received to examine and participate in natural resources based planning projects.
In December 2003, the two CLUE staff responsible for the natural resources papers felt that a focus group of some sort needed to be conducted to identify current natural resources issues in Ashland County . CLUE thus proposed the idea of conducting a focus group to the County Extension agent and the comprehensive planning project consultant. Both were supportive of the idea and endorsed CLUE staff to move forward with it.
Soon after, one of the CLUE staff went to Ashland County to attend the county-wide comprehensive planning meeting, as well as gathering the necessary information for the two papers. One of the offices she visited was the Land Conservation Department, which was planning to do a plan update of Ashland County 's Land & Water Conservation Plan in 2004. The Land Conservation Department staff, upon hearing that CLUE was planning to conduct a focus group in Ashland County sometime in March 2004 to identify current natural resources issues, was very interested in combining the effort, since they were planning to hold meetings around that time as well. The Land Conservation Department staff was enthusiastic about potentially combining efforts to coordinate the meetings. She promised to contact the Extension Agent to discuss about it.
In the mean while, the County Extension Agent attended the County Forestry Department meeting and learned that the Forestry Department was also planning to do a plan update in 2004. She thus proposed that all three planning processes join forces to conduct a county-wide workshop together. The County Forester favored the idea since they had difficulties in gaining public participation in their past planning efforts.
Thus, in January 2004, a teleconference was arranged to initiate the discussion of a combined workshop among CLUE, the Extension Agent, the consultant, County staff, and Land Conservation staff. Each planning project manager briefly explained what they were going to do and what they hoped to get out of a combined or shared workshop. Two key points that convinced the organizations to work together were (i) to increase the diversity of stakeholders and (ii) to minimize community burnout – everyone realized that they would more than likely tap into the same interest groups for input into each of the various plans, and wanted to avoid asking the same people over and over again to essentially similar types of workshops.
Early on all the organizations initially interested realized they could go no further without funding to sponsor a workshop. CLUE agreed to sponsor the event, because of then current funding from an NRCS land use planning project. Without funding, it is unlikely that the group would have gone further. Because this event was not planned earlier on, it was not accounted for in anyone's budget. It was going to be difficult to extract extra funds from any of the three local projects. From January through March the date, format, logistics for the event, marketing, etc. were decided on and carried out. (Continued)
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