9377

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9377
• Author: Colorado Water Workshop.
• Title: 16th Annual Colorado Water Workshop.
• USFW Year: 1991.
• USFW - Doc Type: Western State College.
• Copyright Material: NO

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the Bitterroot, there seems to come a time when the parties have
to begin trusting common data in order to move forward at all.
Once that begins to happen, it is as if a watershed had been
passed, and the parties begin to make a practice of what was at
first only an experiment in digging out the facts together.
At that point, collaborative approaches to resource issues
can evolve into a new and potent relationship between citizens
and government. citizens find themselves squarely in the
driver's seat. When Tom Mehler says, "This could become the kind
of group that could actually manage the resource," he doesn't
mean that the group could dispense with agencies like the
Department of Fish and Game or the Forest Service. But he does
mean that citizens would become involved in resource management
in a way that our modern combination of adversarial and
bureaucratic procedures rarely permits. From the other side of
the dividing line between citizens and bureaucracy, Ned Homer
reaches the same conclusion. He talks about his agency serving
as a catalyst to help lake users reach consensus on issues like
bringing the big rainbow back into Pend Oreille. "If the agency
ever did play that role, they damned well better follow through
on what is recommended," he says. If they didn't, he implies,
there would be political hell to pay. As Mehler says, when a
broad range of interests manage to start cooperating on resource
management issues, "the Governor and the Legislature get
interested in such work because it is so rare to get that kind of
agreement on anything. Once you get that interest," he says,
"the agencies are under pressure to perform."
There is a more positive side to the same coin. When Dick
Orsmbee and Tom Murphy sat their Fish and Game agent down between
them and "worked him over," they pointed out that they were in a
position to help the agency. If farmers and fishermen could
agree on some water allocation measures it would give the agency
a breadth of local support which is very rare in Montana. When
Orsmbee talks about it, there is no mistaking the tone of
confidence in his voice. He understands that he and his fellow
citizens are, in the final analysis, in charge. They can only be
in charge if they can learn to agree with each other, and to
accomplish some resource management tasks together. When people
like Dick Ormsbee and Tom Mehler talk about managing the river
or the lake, they speak in the voice of democratic citizens. But
behind their voices, always, is the sound of the water itself.

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