Mineral County gets advice

MINERAL COUNTY - County commissioners listened to a presentation at their meeting on Thursday to learn what is working when it comes to natural resource management in Idaho.

Boundary County Commissioner Dan Dinning and Patty Perry, administrative director for the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, came to Superior to tell commissioners a collaborative effort undertaken was seeing results. Dinning said they had been successful with bringing stakeholders together to work on managing forests in Idaho.

“In our experience, prior to our collaborative being formed, the relationship with the Forest Service had been extremely adversarial,” Dinning said. “The message we were trying to get across was to bring all of those that may have an interest in managing a national forest to the table.”

Dinning advised Mineral County commissioners the process, in his experience, typically only works if a variety of groups and organizations are represented. Dinning said the key is getting groups that may have opposing viewpoints to sit down and work through the issues together.

“You have to bring fish and game, conservation groups, fish and wildlife and the Forest Service together to work on projects,” Dinning said. “If everyone is there, you can hear all the concerns and work through them together.”

Dinning said working cooperatively, the Kootenai Valley Resource Initiative had been successful in getting natural resource projects approved and completed. He said management activities on the ground were only possible by working together.

“This is a group of proactive people that are addressing the natural resource issues in our area,” Dinning said. “Before everyone was divided. Bringing people to the table has been a great success. Rather than fighting and constantly being at odds, this is a process where people are involved at every stage of natural resource issues.”

Perry, also affiliated with the KVRI, reiterated some of the points made by Dinning. She said the group had seen a number of positive outcomes by working collaboratively.

“We address several natural resource issues and we have had some good results,” Perry said. “We wanted to share with the county commissioners our structure and how we approach projects.”

Mineral County Commissioner Laurie Johnston said managing the natural resources in the county is something she has been concerned with for some time. Johnston said she was encouraged to hear from Dinning and Perry that a collaborative process had been successful.

“They have worked with the Forest Service to move projects ahead,” Johnston said. “That’s what we are trying to do here. We are trying to work hand in hand with them. We wanted to see how they do it and get some ideas from them.”

Johnston said while the county was in the early stages of forming their own collaborative to try and effectively manage area forests, hearing from a group that has done something similar was helping shape the Mineral County version.

“We wanted to hear how their group works and what we need to do as far as who needs to be involved,” Johnston said. “We want to make it a group that will be taken seriously.”

The Mineral County version of the Kootenai Valley Resource Initiative is scheduled to meet on Tuesday to begin the collaborative planning process.