Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat Draft

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PART IV DOING IT TOGETHER CHAPTER TEN: ORGANIZATION OF NEGOTIATIONS "We need to recognize that adversarial, winner-take-all, showdown political decision-making is a way we defeat ourselves. Our future starts when we begin honoring the dreams of our enemies while staying true to our own." Kitteredge, 1996 The only way out of the painful impasse that had been building in the three states was to initiate basin-wide discussions to develop a collective program to serve as a reasonable and prudent alternative--an alternative to shutting down water projects that had been found to be creating jeopardy for listed species. The years 1994 to 1997 would be a time when a general plan would emerge, strategies sketched out, and principles adopted. The problem was to convert the general intent of the 1994 Memorandum of Understanding into a workable 1997 Cooperative Agreement that could meaningfully point to actual construction of a defensible basin-wide recovery program. Upon the signing of the 1994 MOA, the Department of the Interior's Assistant Secretary of Water and Science was appointed to lead the DOI's negotiation team and the Governors of each state appointed staff to represent each state's interests. As the participants found their way to the table, they recognized that, while the process was to be based on consensus, the discussion itself was forced by the ESA. The ESA provided the "bad cop" common enemy that the states needed. The states could not trust one another to fulfill their commitments, however, they could depend upon the ESA to act as a sufficient threat to insure that each party stayed honest and fulfilled their promises (Zallen 1997). Each interested party came to the table with historical animosities and preconceptions of each other, their own positions, as well as the policy requirements that they were there to satisfy. Federal Experience Negotiations were going to be challenging. The whole concept of basin-wide negotiations was experimental. Talks would necessarily: 1) be multi jurisdictional within states (e.g., involving in Colorado the State Engineer's Office, Division of Wildlife, Conservancy Districts, mutual companies, etc.); 2) involve multiple interests within states (e.g., water users in the federal nexus and those who were not); 3) have to reconcile interests of three states with histories of antagonism; 3) pull together a family of federal agencies (FWS, USBR, and Forest Service) each of which had distinct, mandated, and highly political needs; and 4) mesh federal and state water agendas, something never before attempted in the basin. Federal authorities knew well the central interests of actors in all of the large-scale collaborative restoration processes would be essentially the same (Luecke 2000): 50