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Newsletter
Confluence: March 2003, Vol.
5, No. 2
Interesting Individuals
This month’s issue of Confluence interviews Allen
Comp, who for the past four years has been co-director
of the watershed assistance team at the U.S. Department of
the
Interior Office of Surface Mining, and is one of the key
individuals responsible for the creation and development
of the Eastern Coal Regional Roundtable.
CONFLUENCE: Why was the ECRR formed?
ECRR: The EPA was working on the Clean Water Action Plan
about five years ago, which called for ten regional roundtables
that would meet to discuss watershed issues within their
areas and ultimately send representatives to a National Watershed
Forum (which took place in 2001), bringing regional issues
to the attention of many participating federal agencies.
The original roundtable divisions split coal country into
parts of about three different widely separated regions,
and I knew that nobody would come together from coal country
and that once again coal country would be left out of significant
policy discussions on watershed issues. So I called the EPA
and asked if there was any reason against a group forming
its own geographically distinct watershed roundtable. They
said there wasn’t, so we attended an AMD conference
in Virginia with representatives from all over coal country
and added a half-day to convene a watershed roundtable and
gauge interest in the concept. EPA representatives and representatives
of numerous agencies and groups attended, expressing clear
and strong interest in the idea. That meeting lead to actual
recognition of the coal country watershed roundtable as a
regional roundtable recognized by the EPA. We received funding
to convene fifteen watershed groups from around coal country
in a kind of focus group meeting that took place a year later.
Out of that meeting came a decision to participate in this
roundtable discussion as coal country, and to petition the
EPA to recognize the coal country roundtable and fund our
group’s participation in the National Watershed Forum
like they were doing with other roundtables, which the EPA
agreed to do. A dozen coal country watersheds were represented
at the National Watershed Forum and they were very active
participants. We made sure our issues were raised in the
various working groups, and there were several large recommendations
made out of the forum that clearly have a coal country interest
embedded in them.
Given that success, both the EPA Region 3 and OSM made a
conscious decision to try and support the continued development
of the eastern coal country roundtable to create a channel
for immediate communication of information of interest to
AMD impacted watersheds about what’s happening with
EPA or OSM or other federal agency funding initiatives that
watershed groups can take advantage of. There’s a lot
of information out there, but not much that is targeted specifically
to AMD impacted watersheds, which have all of the problems
other watersheds have and more. The EPA and OSM have been
putting in a small amount of funding and have contracted
with the Black Diamond Resource and Conservation District
to support a staff person to bring everything together. Up
until now, that has been a part-time contractor, Erica Clark
Anderson, but the position will soon be converted to a full-time
VISTA position that is about to be filled.
CONFLUENCE: About how many groups are affiliated with the
ECRR?
ECRR: There is no formal affiliation yet. Right now we have
about 800 addresses that we are mailing to, and all of those
are stakeholders in coal country watersheds. Many of them
are watershed groups, some of them are agencies that support
watershed groups, and some are coal companies that have been
supportive of watershed groups. We try to make sure that
we have a range of stakeholders – it’s not just
for watershed groups, although the information we’re
going to be sending out is going to be targeted to those
watershed groups. I don’t think we’ll ever have
formal affiliates, but I hope we get an active participation
base of at least three or four hundred stakeholders.
CONFLUENCE: What types of fundraising assistance does the
ECRR offer stakeholders?
ECRR: The goal is to bring the news about funding opportunities
to coal country watersheds quickly. To kind of sift through
all of the stuff out there, find the items that are really
useful to coal country, and then get that information to
people on the email list quickly. We’re looking at
private sector foundations, we’re looking at federal
agencies – we’re not looking at state agencies
because that’s always state particular, but we want
to feature some state programs so that other states can learn
about them and perhaps think about doing similar projects.
CONFLUENCE: How does the ECRR facilitate communication between
stakeholders, and what sort of decision making method do
the groups use?
ECRR: The primary form of communication among those interested
in the ECRR is going to be email. We also have a website,
and we are going to start accumulating information on that
website that is particularly relevant to watersheds. My hope
would be that we can ultimately develop a system of state
representatives, so that state watershed organizations can
send a representative to ECRR meetings, to represent their
state’s interests in guiding the development and direction
of the ECRR. That’s not in place yet, but I think within
the next two years it needs to be in place.
CONFLUENCE: Has the group gone through any sort of formal
organizational planning? If not, is that planned for the
future?
ECRR: There have been discussions at almost every AMD conference
for about the past five years concerning the need to start
a regional group. It just hasn’t happened because there
hasn’t been anyone to do it. The OSM and EPA have combined
to help the process and see if it would be possible to get
a group started if enough assistance was provided, and that’s
what the ECRR is now. I would hope that within a couple of
years, it will become its own nonprofit organization and
a viable enterprise. If it doesn’t get support from
watershed groups, if they don’t find it useful, then
it should be dead. But it’s not an organization yet.
Calling ECRR a service effort is probably the best way to
understand it.
CONFLUENCE: Where would you like to see the Roundtable headed
in five years? How will you measure your success as a group?
ECRR: If things go well, there will be four or five hundred
active watershed groups that are in fairly constant or active
communication with the ECRR, we will have a series of weekly
or bi-weekly success stories about individual watershed groups
that have taken a particularly innovative approach to acquiring
federal funding or looking at a problem and coming up with
an interesting solution to it, and probably most importantly,
we will be the primary avenue of communication between multiple
federal agencies and all of those watershed groups.
CONFLUENCE: What do you anticipate as the most important
situation the roundtable will have to face?
ECRR: I think the biggest challenge we face is finding a
way to communicate effectively with very busy and occasionally
provincial watershed groups all over coal country.
CONFLUENCE: How does a group join the ECRR?
ECRR: Send an email to easterncoal.org. They can go to the
website and just sign up. It’s right there. No dues,
no obligations. And we don’t sell the mailing list!
For more information on the Eastern Coal Regional Roundtable,
go to www.easterncoal.org
Allen Comp can be reached at phone: 202-208-2836 or email:
tcomp@osmre.gov
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