There is a problem with current approaches to watershed restoration: without a new approach to providing assistance to private landowners, the federal funding under any currently proposed efforts will not be used as effectively as it potentially could be used.
The reason is that federal and state programs focus on the money and whether it is spent in accordance with the proposals and other requirements. An implicit, but often erroneous, assumption is that groups such as local Resource Conservation Districts have access to the technical information and assistance to choose the most cost-effective, appropriate methods and to successfully execute the projects. In reality, such information and assistance is scattered, uncoordinated, or unavailable. Federal efforts are not coordinated across the spectrum of resource disciplines and agency boundaries to attack common problems, mainly because of professional and institutional barriers. The "ecosystem approach" presents a good excuse to remove these barriers.
Proposed Strategy: A programmatic approach to watershed restoration would go a long way toward insuring the proposers have good access to both technical information and assistance. It would also provide an agency with the means to evaluate proposals against a strong technical backdrop. Orienting watershed restoration assistance to a standardized approach that would be common to all of the salmon regions of the West would help all involved. Federal funding could even be contingent on referencing this service.
The proposed programs are based on categories of similar types of projects: water conservation, water rights, fish passage, instream habitat, channel rehabilitation, revegetation (riparian & upslope), livestock management, road management, monitoring, and coordinated watershed planning. While the Soil Conservation Service is potentially capable of doing much of this, in reality their help is greatly reduced due to budgetary cutbacks and Farm Bill duties. Other federal agencies also have expertise to offer, such as Bureau of Reclamation with ditches and USFS with instream structures.
When formulating project proposals, local restoration groups often suffer from the "reinvent the wheel" syndrome. They try to develop new solutions to problems despite the widespread occurrence of similar projects throughout the West. Under a programmatic approach, the federal effort would pull together the essential technical information about these "generic" watershed projects as a reference service for local restoration efforts. Each program office would gather available designs, specifications, evaluations, materials, costs, suppliers, and examples of each type of restoration project.
Example: Livestock operators all over the West divert water, so vital to the fisheries, into leaky ditches for livestock watering. Many stockmen will not change to a more efficient watering system because they don't believe there is a reliable water trough that won't freeze in harsh winters. To address these problems, a local project coordinator could call up (or fax, or e-mail) the Water Conservation Program Office (or Coordinator) and obtain everything they need to know about lining ditches or putting in pipelines, or call the Livestock Management Program Office and get several designs, costs and suppliers of a freeze-proof watering trough. Each Program Office/Coordinator would not have to be centrally located with other programs in one building but could be a designated manager and staff in existing federal offices in the western region, as long as the phone/fax/e-mail number (any chance of an 800 number?) of the contact is made available to local watershed restoration groups.
Local Field Assistance: Another bottleneck is lack of local technical assistance. For example, the SCS office in Yreka is down to two people with only one engineering technician and no engineer. A survey of ditches in Scott Valley revealed at least 155 ditches which could potentially be replaced with pipelines or well systems to conserve water. To do this conversion properly requires surveying and engineering expertise. In the past, SCS has offered this service but our SCS-Scott Valley engineering technician retired and was not replaced. If an intensive effort to address water conservation in ditches is funded, then we could not implement it rapidly with the currently available technical assistance. Having a traveling team of federal/state field people available who could come to our area for an intensive effort and perform the necessary field work, or train local people (such as in surveying skills or monitoring techniques), would be one possible solution.
