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Our History
Summary of the first Roundtable meeting in 2000
Background on the Clean Water Action Plan and the formation of the Eastern Coal Regional Roundtable
Hope and Hard Work features success stories of some of the members of the original Eastern Coal Regional Roundtable.
The following interview of T. Allan Comp appeared in Confluence: March 2003, Vol. 5, No. 2
Interesting Individuals
This month’s issue of Confluence interviews Allan 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
Allan Comp can be reached at phone: 202-208-2836 or email: tcomp@osmre.gov