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Present: John Brazner, Pat Collins, Tom Duffus, Howard McCormick, Karen Plass, John Powers, Dennis Pratt, Carl Richards, Bill Swenson and Fred Strand.

1. Committee Membership and Structure:

• Chair Pat Collins would like to see another member of the group step up to serve a term as chair.
• ** Karen Plass to add Kinnan Stauber to the distribution list.
• ** Karen to add an educator from Sea Grant, Extension, etc. Cindy Hagley?

2. Some things we want to accomplish with the CAC's Habitat Plan:

• Reinvigorate the CAC by coordinating with lots of people.
• Identify critical habitats so developers know best/worse places to build.
• Help city and county planners, and economic development people, steer businesses away from priority areas. (Glenn Sweeney in Superior; Keith Hamre and Cindy Albright in Duluth, etc.)
• Also want a short summary to be widely distributed, maybe even to realtors; shoreland development is a concern, too - not just direct in-water impacts.
• Transcend eco-emotionalism, which pits people against each other.
• Follow TNC’s model for the clinch River: Partners were actively involved from the start.
• Have habitat people develop the first part of the plan; include developers later.
• Have the Habitat Plan incorporated by reference into other plans.
• Get the GIS maps on a CD and share it with municipal planning departments.
• It should be, like Duluth's Natural Resources Inventory, provided to those who need the information for making decisions.

3. The Nature Conservancy can help:

• Mary Harkness (TNC Conservation Planning Biologist) will be here from July through October. She can help us conceptualize this part of the project (habitat zones, etc.); may be able to jump start us.
• TNC has funding to put on a Site Conservation Planning Workshop that could be helpful as we begin developing the Habitat Plan. The Habitat Committee will be invited.

4. RFP:

• We talked about what should be in the RFP, which was subsequently drafted by John Powers, reviewed by the committee and distributed by Karen Plass.
• The contractor won't "do" the plan, but will help us "do" it; will pull together info from stakeholders and articulate it into a plan for the committee and the CAC. This will be a CAC product, prepared for us by the contractor.
• Both the process and the information are important.
• The contractor wouldn’t make presentations about the plan, but would develop a script.

• This is a two-year project; the contractor cannot compress it into one year.

5. Plan Development:

• To develop the plan, scientists want to gather data for the first year.
• John Powers noted that, to a planner, data doesn't drive the plan; planners "intuit" a plan and data fills it in.
• The TNC workshop will help with the plan's format.
• The first months on the plan will involve formulating its framework.
• ** Karen to check on the CEM grant's start and end dates. Won't be ready to start before August - maybe Sept. 1.

6. Models:

• Environmental Atlas for the Potomac River? (Pat Collins). The atlas doesn't have recommendations.
• TNC? ** Tom Duffus to talk to Mary Harkness, and will look for TNC models (Lake Ontario, Virginia Coast Reserve).
• Green Bay RAP? ** John Brazner to get sample State of the Bay materials.
• IJC? ** Karen to see if IJC has any models

Note: ** = Action Item.

Minutes prepared by Karen Plass, August 9, 1999.