December 26, 2007
By RODGER NICHOLS
The Dalles Chronicle

How do you measure quality of recreation? Is it more important to track species or habitat when considering natural resources? Are vacancy rates a stronger indication of economic health than household income?

Those are just a few of the questions facing members of the Columbia River Gorge Commission’s Vital Signs Indicators project.

The project seeks to provide scientific, objective, verifiable measures of the health of the Gorge so the commission can measure how well — or poorly —- it has been doing its job.

At its August meeting, the commission approved a set of working goals and the creation of a Technical Advisory Team and a Community Advisory Team.

The technical team is chaired by Dr. Susan Wolff of Columbia Gorge Community College, who has a background as a facilitator. The group has met several times since its first meeting in October.

The Technical Advisory Team also has subgroups examining measures for scenic resources, natural resources, cultural resources, recreational resources and economic development, all identified as the key purposes of the National Scenic Area Act.

The community team met only once before the groups got together for the first time Dec. 13 and began exploring some of the issues.

The concept, as explained by Community Advisory Team leader North Cheatham, of Hood River, is that the group will receive “conceptual indicators” from the technical advisory group, refine them and provide the technical group with feedback.

The idea, he said, is that “When they give us those guidelines, that’s when we can decide from our own perspective what is important to the community.”

Last Thursday’s joint meeting provided the first steps in that process, as various subgroups from the TAT reported their progress.

Here’s a quick roundup of those reports:

Rich Davis of Washington Parks and Recreation reported on the recreation resources subgroup. “We were tasked with the quality and diversity of recreation in the Gorge,” he said. “We thought the diversity would be pretty easy to answer. The Forest Service and Army Corps of Engineers have some pretty good data starting back in ’86.”

He noted the group had decided to look at recreation in the urban areas as well, because the Gorge Commission had partly funded some waterfront trails.

“We thought it vital looking at diversity in the Gorge that we could not overlook the urban areas,” he said.

“When we got to the quality issue. it was far more difficult,” Davis added. “Somebody may say that two people is one too many and some people may say a small group is a dozen people.”

Randy Bluffstone of the environmental economics department of Portland State University, who serves on the economic resources subgroup, concluded his group had the opposite problem from the other groups, which are scrambling to find indicators. He said the economic group was in “a fairly data-rich environment” due to an abundance of information on economic activity. He said the economic group’s problem would be narrowing the list down to the most relevant measures.

Some of the original objectives for the natural resources subgroup focused on sensitive wildlife species.

“The group felt that sensitive wildlife species was not a good representative subset of plants and animals,” said Jimmy Kagen, director of the Oregon Natural Heritage Information Center.

“Those things were already getting a lot of attention in that they were selected often for political reasons or often because they are species people know. And really, the best way to protect all the plants and animals is to protect their habitat, and if you did do a good job of protecting their habitat, then you’re going to take care of the species.”

Kagen also reported the group had discussed the problem of invasive species.

“There was a question about whether we should have a separate invasive species upper level indicator,” he said. “The group felt invasive species are a major threat to both plant species and habitat. And one of the habitat quality indicators would be the presence of invasive species.”

He said the difficulty was that neither Oregon nor Washington has a lot of comprehensive data, but did have good maps for some species such as cheat grass and medusa head.

That subgroup met for the first time just before the joint meeting last Thursday. Landscape architect Brian Bainson said his group was a little uncomfortable with the words “diversity” and “existing” in one of the objectives for his subgroup, “to protect the diversity and visual character of the existing landscape.”

“Between now and our meeting in early January we are going to brainstorm a list of what the indicators could be,” he said.

There was no report from the cultural subgroup, but TAT Chair Susan Wolff said the group had been making progress and had been posting to the project’s wiki.

A “wiki” is a Web site or similar online resource that allows users to create, edit, and link Web pages easily. The Gorge Commission has set up a site for members of both teams to communicate.

As the technical teams gave their reports, members of the community team asked questions and gave some initial feedback.

A key question facing the whole project is how many indicators should there be. Jeff Tryens, former executive director of the Oregon Progress Board, has been hired by the Gorge Commission as a consultant on the project. He told the joint group that it would be easy to have 25 indicators for each area.

“Is that going to tell us a story that people are going to understand?” he asked the group. “Or do we want those really important few? That is going to be an important question we are going to have to answer when we are reporting to the people who care about the Gorge.”

The two chairs were careful to pull back when members of both teams drifted into detailed specifics.

Susan Wolff, who chairs the technical team, noted, “Their work is to establish the what. Their work is not to do the how or the why. It’s so easy for us to get so involved that it’s easiest to drill down, and I think we need to keep ourselves at this level so we do have an end to our work. Other people can take our work and do the how.”