Farestad tackles CIB’s conservation plan

By Jonathan Starkey
Staff Reporter

For six weeks, Muns Farestad has sat on a Citizens Advisory Committee subcommittee, assessing the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) just more than 10 years since its inception.

And frankly, Farestad said, he has just been trying to understand the document, which helped found the Center for the Inland Bays and continues to be a model for work surrounding Delaware’s watershed.

More specifically — in the last couple of weeks — he has been sifting through the Habitat Protection Plan in the document, pulling tactics and goals of the plan from Chapter 3 of the CCMP and in tables following the chapter.

After studying all of that information, the former engineer dealt with it the only way he knew how: by putting in into a spreadsheet in a comprehensive manner. He presented that spreadsheet to his fellow subcommittee members on Tuesday in an attempt for everyone to better understand the portion of the document for which he is responsible.

“My objective was to create that list that I can proceed with and begin assessing that portion of the plan,” Farestad said on Wednesday.

There are seven main themes established in the Habitat Protection Plan in the CCMP, ranging from creating Resource Protection Plans (RPA) to developing county protection ordinances for wildlife in Delaware’s bays.

On the presented spreadsheet, Farestad listed goals mentioned in the plan for each theme, and tactics for achieving those goals. Those tactics are usually spread out over short- and long-term periods used to reach the goals. One of the goals in the RPA section, for instance, is to “promote recurrence of submerged aquatic vegetation.”

To do that, the CIB and other organizations including the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control had planed to select seven or eight sanctuary areas where there is an opportunity to develop an RPA. Those areas would then be protected.

The problem is, Farestad said, that there has been no specific documentation of this process in the last decade. No RPA’s have been identified yet. Other work could have been done, but Farestad said he didn’t know of that work or where to find information about it.

The subcommittee’s lack of information surrounding CCMP planned projects in the Habitat Protection Plan could be a reoccurring theme as the committee members attempt to assess the document’s value over the last decade, Farestad added.

“It’s a web,” he said of the CCMP. “I have made no conclusions at this point, positive or negative. I still am learning. And I’m only focusing on the small part of it. It’s a significant part but the document is far bigger than (the portion) I presented.”

Farestad said he will attempt to learn more about the progress of CCMP-founded projects in the last decade by sending a list of questions to experts, starting with CIB officials. Those experts can lead him to more experts, he added, and he wants to talk to people who worked on the document from 1992 to 1995 before its publication in June of 1995. They, above all, he said can help him understand the goals as he tries to alleviate some of the subcommittee’s confusion on the tactical progress of CCMP-founded projects.

“It’s extraordinarily difficult,” Farestad said of the process. “You’ll find lists of pages of people that were involved. All these people know more than I know. And here I am 10 years later trying to look back on that. There’s a lot of confusion about what the CCMP is.”