Wildlife Habitat:

Darby Nelson: Outdoor Heritage Council Approves Draft Funding Plan

Topic: Wildlife Habitat

Darby Nelson, president of the board of Conservation Minnesota and a member of the state's Outdoor Heritage Council, discusses the Council's tentative 2011 Legacy Amendment funding recommendations for fish, game and wildlife habitat conservation.

The Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council agreed on a tentative package of twenty-two funding requests by unanimous vote December 15.

Although putting together this agreement is an important step toward establishing our final funding recommendations for the legislature, it remains a draft , and is subject to final review and potential tweaking at our January 7 meeting.

So how does the package look at this point? The Council feels very good about the proposals that we recommend be funded. The twenty-two project managers did an excellent job focusing on the priorities we established based on conservation professional’s advice that emerged at our five regional meetings last summer. Here are some details.

We have allocated $56,264,000 for our funded projects. Additionally, we plan to release the final $18 million payment for the 187,000 acre forest easement acquisition in northeastern Minnesota and $1.9 million to complete the Rum River-Cedar Creek Initiative we committed to in the first funding round in April. That brings our total allocation to a bit over $76 million. (The Outdoor Heritage Fund receives one-third of the new sales tax money produced by the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, and yes, we are keeping a close eye on projected declines in sales tax revenue.)

Unfortunately, funding requests by the twenty-two programs exceeded available funds by well over $100 million. As a result, only our Conservation Partners-small grants program was funded at the level requested. Many funds will receive only half of what they requested, some even less than that.

All of the projects had merit. It was gut-wrenching for me to cut back on the requested amounts. Each cut meant programmatic reductions and so less conservation work to be done.

Program work will occur in all five of our ecological regions (Northern Forest, Southeast Forest, Metro Urbanizing Area, Prairie-Forest Transition, and Prairie). Nine programs will work in single regions. The remaining thirteen touch multiple regions. Each of five programs will do work in all five of the regions. This outcome resulted in reasonably even distribution of projects across all five regions of the state. Projects were also distributed across all habitat types. (More details in next week’s column.)

A diverse set of organizations are to receive funding including: Board of Water and Soil Resources (working in the RIM Reserve and Wetlands Reserve Program), The Nature Conservancy, DNR (multiple programs) , Minnesota Council of Trout Unlimited, US Fish and Wildlife Service (several programs), Redwood Area Communities Foundation, Pheasants Forever, Minnesota Land Trust, Minnesota Sharp Tail Grouse Society, Minnesota National Wildlife Refuge Trust, Dakota County, Cass County, Great River Greening, and Washington County. Many of the programs included a considerable number of partner organizations not listed above.

All-in-all I think citizens can be very pleased with how their conservation investment dollars are to be spent.

Lots more details to come in next week’s column.

Darby Nelson

Darby Nelson: Outdoor Heritage Council Approves Draft Funding Plan

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