Thursday, April 12, 2001 8:15 AM MST

Watershed group forming

By NEIL BOYLE/Of the Advocate

The council appointed Vice Mayor Michele White as the city's representative to the Noyo Watershed Advisory Group, which is being organized to seek grant moneys to restore the watershed.

Jackson reviewed a letter received from Roanne Withers, executive director of the Rural Institute, a countywide non-profit organization, which requested that the city participate in the watershed group. The three largest landowners in the Noyo River watershed the Mendocino Redwood Co., the Campbell-Hawthorne Timber Group and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection have agreed to meet with the Friends of the Noyo River Watershed and the California Department of Fish and Game to discuss the organization of the watershed group and funding opportunities, Withers wrote.

In a brief Tuesday phone interview, Withers said she's hopeful that the major stakeholders will meet within the next two or three weeks to organize the watershed group. Once the meeting format is finalized, the meetings will be open to the public. "This is an exciting project. When we asked MRC and Campbell-Hawthorne to meet, they said, 'Yes, let's do it right away,'" she added.

In her letter to the council, Withers noted the National Marine Fisheries Service listed local coho and steelhead at risk of becoming extinct under the federal Endangered Species Act. The letter states, in part: "While there are many uncontrollable environmental factors which are now understood as contributing to the periodic increase and decrease of salmonid populations, their overall escalating downward spiral towards extinction is almost universally understood to be human-caused degradation of their fresh water river spawning and juvenile rearing habitat due to dams, water appropriations, and historic and current land use practices.

"For those who have not completely arrived at this understanding, it is still acknowledged that there are significant improvements that humans can make that benefit salmon habitat. In addition, salmon have recently been confirmed as a 'keystone species,' meaning that their decline triggers cascading declines of many of the watershed ecosystem's major food chains (for 137 known species).

" ... It is understood that increasing, and then trying to enforce regulations that prohibit landowner impacts to salmon spawning habitat alone is contentious, and costly to the taxpayer in a number of ways. Those who have been closely following the situation are aware that subtle but ever increasing pressure is being applied by state and federal regulatory agencies for riparian landowners and local government entities to engage both community-based and science-based 'all-stakeholder' watershed management planning for endangered salmon protection and habitat restoration activities.

"Thus, the trend is to create a combination of incentives for voluntary, responsible land use management along with increasing regulation if landowners do not voluntarily engage in improvements. This has brought many of the aware landowners to the watershed planning table."