BLM NEPA Training Strategy Session

**A Telecast Originating**

**from the**

**BLM National Training Center in Phoenix, Arizona**

**February 27, 2003**

This transcript is from the closed-captioning file produced during the
telecast.

It may contain errors and omissions in transcription.

**Announcer:** The Bureau of Land Management Satellite Network presents
live from the BLM\'s National Training Center in Phoenix, Arizona the
NEPA Training Strategy Session where you\'re welcome to join in our
discussion on NEPA training needs. And now your session facilitator,
Cathy Humphrey.\
\
C. Humphrey: Good morning. Welcome to our NEPA Strategy Session. This is
the first time the National Training Center has used interactive
satellite technology to refine a training strategy. So we\'re really
happy you could join us today. My name is Cathy Humphrey. I\'m the lead
planning and NEPA training coordinator here at the National Training
Center in Phoenix and with me here today is Dave stout. He\'s Associate
Field Manager in Elko Field Office in Nevada. So I\'m glad Dave is
sitting here with me. I have never done this before. Have you ever done
this before, Dave?\
\
D. Stout: No. Amateurs.\
\
C. Humphrey: We are amateurs. So go easy on us. Dave and I are sitting
here and we\'re representing the NEPA strategy team. There\'s about 10,
15 people that are with us this week that we were talking about how to
\-- what a strategy for the NEPA program over the next five years would
be, especially training. We focused on training but we came up with some
other ideas, too. As you know, we\'re using push-to-talk. It\'s also
called interactive satellite.

We felt it was a better way to give you this information rather than
just sending an e-mail like I\'m so good at sending all the e-mails I
send and most of you should have registered your sites the past half
hour with Chip, did a site check-in so you should be connected to the
push-to-talk phone bridge. For those of you who are just joining us and
haven\'t \-- didn\'t check in with us, if you could quickly fax us a
list your location, who you are, how many people are at your site, we
would appreciate it. We\'re trying to keep track of everyone who is
joining us. The fax number will be on the screen in just a minute.

Let me quickly go over the push-to-talk system in case you missed when
it Chip did it. Everyone should have one of these radar O\'Reilly
looking microphones and what you need to do is push the button to talk,
push the button and keep it pressed, hold it at about arm\'s length and
talk in a normal voice. When you push the button, the sound should be
muted. If the sound isn\'t muted, it means your system isn\'t working
correctly and you need to call us or fax us and tell us that your system
isn\'t working. The phone numbers to call us should be on your screen. .
A couple other things about the push-to-talk system. If more than one of
you are speaking at a time, since your audio is muted you can\'t hear
it. So we can hear both of you talking. So if you see me do this
time-out, stop talking and we\'ll call on the first person that talked
to us. Stop talking and release your microphone button. So when you talk
to us if you could please state your name and office you\'re sitting in,
we would like to keep track of your comments and we have somebody in the
other room recording your input for us. Are there any questions about
the system before we get started? Great.

We have a couple of objectives in this Strategy Session, and the first
one is we wanted to discuss the NEPA Strategy Team\'s preliminary
recommendations for a five-year NEPA strategy. Our second objective is
we wanted to get input from the field folks on the NEPA process and
recommendations and input on our recommendations. So, Dave, how would
you like to tell the audience what we\'re going to talk about for the
next hour-and-a-half.\
\
D. Stout: I\'ll tell them. I won\'t tell you how I would like to. This
morning we\'re going to talk about the following things. We\'re going to
talk about the mission, makeup and introductions of the NEPA Strategy
Team. We\'re going to discuss the data we used to develop our
preliminary recommendations. And we\'re going to have a summary of what
we\'ve done in the last two days. Then we\'ll have about 45 minutes for
those of you out in the field to tell us what you think about what
you\'ve just heard. Finally, we\'ll talk briefly about what\'s planned
or what\'s next.

The NTC gathered a group of people this week in Phoenix to discuss the
BLM\'s NEPA training needs. The team includes field, staff and managers,
state and Field Office planning and NEPA leads and Washington Office
staff. Those participating today are Terry Loyer, Richard Hardt, Jim
Ramakka, Scott Pavey, Gregg Simmons, Jim Perry, John Thompson and Susan
Baughman. Celia ANDO and Sandy Austin were facilitators for the group
and we appreciate their assistance in the last couple of days. Although
they couldn\'t all be on camera, they are watching with you and have a
push-to-talk system hooked up here at the Training Center, if you have
any questions for any of them.

Team member Terry Dickens is in the control room, so she won\'t be
available to respond to your questions. We used data from a needs
assessment that many of you may have completed, information from recent
lawsuits and our own experiences to come up with a preliminary list of
training needs. We hope you can provide us with additional information
so we can refine and prioritize this list and begin to develop some
training for you. Cathy?\
\
C. Humphrey: One thing I wanted to add, Dave, we forgot to write this
down, Glenn Carpenter is joining us today also. So he\'s on our team as
well. So if we could go to the Elmo here for a minute, I would like to
emphasize and expand a little bit on what Dave just said. We took the
NEPA training needs assessment, talked about some legal challenges,
looked at how NEPA is happening right now with the Policy and
guidelines. We met with the NEPA Strategy Team. We\'re going to take
your input today and we\'re coming up with where we would like the NEPA
program to be in about five years, focusing on NEPA training. What we
could come up with is either new courses, maybe some revisions of
existing courses, buying some vendor courses and perhaps some job aids
or other tools. For those of you who aren\'t familiar with the term
\"job aids,\" that\'s perhaps \-- we could have \-- for the
administrative record, for example, we could print out \-- or send out
an instructional memorandum, put something on the Internet, just a
checklist maybe to refer to, something like that. That\'s a job aid. So
those are sums of the things that we\'re looking at. I would like to
talk a little bit about some of the preliminary recommendations that we
got from the needs assessment.

We\'re not going to spend a lot of time on that, but I just wanted to
give you a little bit of background on it. Last summer we sent out this
NEPA training needs assessment to about \-- pretty much everybody in the
BLM. We asked everybody to rate themselves on 51 tasks. We asked them to
rate themselves on their skill, their frequency and the importance, how
important they felt the task was and these are NEPA tasks. Then we also
asked them to rate their office on four different tasks for the same
frequency, skill and importance. We received about 771 responses and I
wanted to show you some of the types of \-- the responses \-- where we
got the responses from. We got responses from just about every state and
we got almost 150 from Oregon/Washington. And we got almost twice the
average responses from Arizona. So Arizona gave us the most
comparatively. In addition to that, we got comments from over 80% of the
comments were from the Field Office staff, which is what we expect. So
there\'s no surprise there.

And then NEPA role, about 44% of the comments we got were from resource
specialists or I.D. team members and we got comments from 84 managers or
supervisors, which surprised me. I thought that was really great. Their
input is very valuable to us. And finally one more graph here, NEPA
experience. Over 53% of the people that responded had over 10 years of
experience in NEPA. So that gives you an idea of who responded to us and
without going into a lot of detail I would like to talk about some of
the major areas that were identified as having a high training need. So
these were areas where people felt the task was pretty important, they
had a fairly low skill and they did somewhat frequently.

Those areas include public involvement, analyzing and comparing
alternatives, effects analysis, especially cumulative effects, how to
review NEPA documents and how to document findings and conclusions, for
example, righting a FONSI, record of decision. So we\'re preparing a
NEPA training needs assessment document that will summarize all this
data. That report will be made available in the next couple of months
and since we\'re dumping a lot of information on you and we didn\'t have
a chance to send the information to you in advance of this broadcast,
since we\'ve been meeting just the last couple of days, we\'ve talked
about sending out all of this information to those of you who are on the
broadcast today. So make sure you send us a fax telling us that you\'re
on here. One of the other things we talked about during the last couple
days in building our NEPA strategy were legal challenges. Dave, do you
want to talk about those that.\
\
D. Stout: I will do that. First a housekeeping thing, we have been
joined by Medford, Oregon, five participants. I understand their
push-to-talk is not working so we\'ll expect a fax question or two.
While developing the training strategy we reviewed some of the reasons
we\'ve lost legal challenges in the past. A few things we have to
remember to do are, when writing an EA and decision record provide solid
rationale why impacts are not significant. Consider all comments,
especially all adverse internal and external expert comments. Support
your findings with clear detailed analysis of evidence. Analyze a full
range of reasonable alternatives and document those that are not
reasonable. And adequately analyze cumulative effects. Maybe I\'ll take
just a minute here and see if anybody out there has a question at this
point.

Let\'s motor ahead, then. Over the past two days our review process
involved the following: We started by looking at the results of the
needs assessment, including some of the things that Cathy went over a
few minutes ago. We listed the tasks that respondents repeatedly rated
as being very important but with which they had low skill. We discussed
preliminary recommendations on the NEPA courses and topics we feel the
BLM needs over the next several years. Using the information we
gathered, we came one three topics we would like to discuss with all of
you. The first topic is the working draft of our vision. We developed a
vision statement for a five-year NEPA strategy, and that is improve the
quality of analyses, documentation and decisions by providing training
to achieve the intent of NEPA and BLM\'s strategic goals, involving the
public throughout the NEPA process, ensuring line officers understand
their role in the NEPA process, insuring all offices have a NEPA
coordinator, increasing visibility, understanding and support of the
NEPA program. Does this raise any questions in the minds of any of you
out there? Do you have any opinions you would like to share at this
point?\
\
C. Humphrey: Dave, one thing I would like to emphasize that wasn\'t up
there on the screen but the overall vision is to improve the quality of
NEPA analysis, documentation and decisions, and those bullets fed into
that. So I wanted to emphasize that.\
\
D. Stout: Thanks.\
\
Caller: Yes, hello, this is Edie in Barstow. I guess one of the things
that is a concern here in Southern California has to do with not only
analyzing impacts and consistency, but also standards for consistency,
especially where we have offices doing similar analyses that are
adjacent. Is there anything that came out in your review and anything
\-- any thoughts in terms of your training that is addressing that
issue?\
\
D. Stout: The simple answer is yes. That elicited quite a bit of
discussion in the team and there\'s consistency both within BLM offices
and consistency among agencies who deal with NEPA. So without going into
a tremendous amount of detail, the Strategy Team did discuss those
topics, and hopefully we\'ll have someway to address that as the
strategy develops into a more formal format or style. So kind of a
general response to your question. I hope that at least gives you some
hope that we will be addressing that topic.\
\
Caller: Karl with the Wyoming State Office reservoir management group in
Casper, Wyoming. For the past several years the Federal land management
agencies, including the BLM, Forest Service, National Park Service, EPA
have been working under the Federal leadership forum to address some of
these same questions. In your strategy discussion, did you all identify
any cross links with that effort and your own?\
\
C. Humphrey: I can take that one. We didn\'t identify that specifically.
We met for the last two days and we didn\'t quite have enough time, but
that is a good idea. I know about that Federal leadership forum, and we
can add that to our \-- things to consider for the strategy. So do you
have any more specifics on that?\
\
Caller: Yes, and the reason why I bring it up is that this workgroup,
one of their work groups have been asked to develop a training strategy
in the interagency sense to facilitate training in the various agencies
on some of the products that the forum has come up and they have one
particular effort looking at cumulative

effects and reasonable foreseeable development. Another has to do with
resource assessment, and then a third has to do with improving NEPA
processes.\
\
C. Humphrey: Are there people in Colorado involved in that?\
\
Caller: Say again, please.\
\
C. Humphrey: There are people in Colorado involved in that, Karl?\
\
Caller: Yes, Cathy, all of the Rocky Mountain BLM state offices,
Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico were involved, as indeed
all of the Forest Service regions in about that same Federal regional
area, same thing true with the park service and EPA, I think it\'s
region 8, BIA is an associate member of that group.\
\
C. Humphrey: We do need to talk about that, so we\'ve got that down, and
I\'ll be talking \-- who would the contact be, Karl, for that? Because
I\'ve talked to some people about it. Do you know who the main contact
would be? Karl?\
\
Caller: Say again, Cathy.\
\
C. Humphrey: Maybe you didn\'t hear me. Do you know who the main BLM
contact would be for that?\
\
Caller: As a representative on a core team, each State Office, State
Director, is represented on the leaders forum.\
\
C. Humphrey: Ok. All right. Great. Thanks.\
\
Caller: I can e-mail you some contacts for each state.\
\
C. Humphrey: Ok. That would be great. Thanks, Karl.\
\
D. Stout: Any other questions on this topic or did you want to say
something else?\
\
C. Humphrey: No. On the vision?\
\
D. Stout: Yes, on the vision. Ok. Let\'s move ahead. Our team took more
than 50 strategy ideas and molded them into 7 strategy categories.
Although the emphasis of the team has been on training, we also have
developed NEPA training related recommendations. So the first of these
is national NEPA guidance. The team has identified a need to revise the
BLM NEPA handbook and revisit the existing categorical exclusion list.
The next is web-based job aids. Those would enhance the profile and
content of the electronic planning and NEPA library. Third, outreach and
recruitment. The team identify add need to examine existing university
training, intern and mentoring programs and partnerships as avenues to
recruit a cadre of qualified career track NEPA and planning
coordinators. The fourth strategy topic is NEPA program leadership. We
recommend to increase NEPA program leadership by establishing a
Washington Office NEPA program lead and increased field support by
identifying regional specialists to answer field questions. Next was
budget. Always a common topic these days. We recommend dedicating
funding to support the NEPA positions and training identified in other
strategies. Sixth is networking for professional development. Through
conducting and attending state, regional and national conferences by
becoming active in professional organizations and building and nurturing
personal networks we think the professional development of NEPA and
planning coordinators could be enhanced. Finally, training. We recommend
basic NEPA training for beginning level and resource specialists and
NEPA practitioners, advanced training and refresher training for
managers and team leaders and technical coordinators and the in the
leadership academy. Training modules would be developed for appropriate
beginning and advanced-level courses. We recommend interactive training
for many of these modules. Let\'s pause again for questions if there are
any. We kind of went through a bunch of text real quickly. Anybody out
there have something they want to offer?\
\
C. Humphrey: And, Dave, I understand that Albuquerque just signed on but
their push-to-talk isn\'t working. So that\'s, what, Albuquerque and
Medford? So we\'re expecting faxes from Albuquerque and Medford. We know
Dave just dumped a lot of information on you and we\'re curious to get
your input. We have some controversial things in there that we\'re
proposing, but they\'re preliminary, like we said, and if you need him
to repeat any of those items, then he can repeat them or we could put
the list back up on the screen.\
\
Caller: Dave, this is Joe in Roseburg.\
\
D. Stout: Good morning. Go ahead.\
\
Caller: You mentioned revision of the categorical exclusive list. I know
that\'s been ongoing for years and years now. Can you give us any sense
of what that might be updated and what we might see in it?\
\
D. Stout: I think the operable term would be to revisit as opposed to
revise, but we identified that obviously as a need, but we have really
no timetable or didn\'t really discuss a timetable. I think, as you
indicated, there is \-- or was some effort under way, but at this point
it\'s just a recommendation that we hope can be carried forward to
Washington or the other people who might be involved in revisiting the
question and come to some conclusion.\
\
C. Humphrey: Has the Washington Office signed on yet? I guess they\'re
not on. I was hoping they could hear this.\
\
Caller: This is Paul in Roseburg.\
\
D. Stout: Ok.\
\
Caller: If I understood correctly, one of the moves is going to be to
try and bring entry-level resource specialists into the NEPA process
with some training. This is something that I felt has been, you know,
really lacking and would be really important to try and instill in the
new cadre of people coming in what their participation, their level of
participation and knowledge, need to be.\
\
D. Stout: We agree. We had a lot of discussion about that, and not only
did we talk about the entry level people, who often just get kind of
costed into the fire in terms of having to prepare a NEPA document, but
some other options in terms of trying to perhaps go to universities and
recruit some people at the same time as explaining our NEPA process to
students to bring interns and other kinds of students in as a mentoring
sort of a thing to get them familiar with NEPA. So an overall emphasis
on early introduction to NEPA and getting people trained correctly
instead of letting them maybe get some bad habits and have problems
later on when they attempt to prepare NEPA documents. We think it\'s
important to get moving early on and get good solid training for new
people. Cathy, did you want to say something?\
\
C. Humphrey: No, I agree.\
\
D. Stout: Ok.\
\
Caller: I just \-- this is Edie again. I would just like to second we
have actually brought out a NEPA trainer to our office, and most of our
resources and recreation staff are NEPA leads on projects, but bringing
out a NEPA trainer for a one-time NEPA shot, because we have such
turnover, doesn\'t capture everything. So having an interactive based
training that can pick up people and also for the folks that just duo
indicational documentation so that, you know, they don\'t \-- they can
go back for refreshment is a great idea because we just have so much
NEPA work coming into our office that it would really help an awful lot.
So even for our office, which has had NEPA training, I think it would be
a great support system.\
\
D. Stout: Thanks. Other comments?

Caller: This is Kent in meeker, Colorado. Good morning. I think your
strategies are well focused and I think one thing that would be
important to maybe identify is that, you know, a lot of our work is \--
revolves around EA type level NEPA and versus say an ES at a planning
level. Have you addressed that? My only other comment is I\'m a little
surprised there isn\'t any reference on your strategy to contracting out
NEPA and perhaps that would be more appropriate at the EIS-level.\
\
C. Humphrey: That\'s a good point. Since a lot of these comments about
training, should I talk about the training and then \--\
\
D. Stout: We should point out that Cathy has a discussion just coming
bullpen specific training kind of things, so we can address some of
these questions with what you have to say.\
\
C. Humphrey: We\'re going to be moving onto training in a minute, so can
we deal with your question in a moment and see if anybody has any other
input on some of the other topics like budget, networking? The
networking is one that I was pretty excited about. We were talking about
maybe sponsoring a conference, a yearly conference, down here \-- maybe
starting down here in Phoenix, but moving around the country once every
year, twice a year, something like that and we could offer either
discussion groups or we could have half-day, two-hour, whatever mini
modules, training modules, and so people could come to the conference,
they could network with their fellow NEPA practitioners, and then they
could take all the different modules of courses, for example. We also
talked about sending more BLM people to professional societies, planning
societies and their annual meetings. So making NEPA more of a forward
thing in the BLM.\
\
D. Stout: The strategy topics \--\
\
Caller: This is Terry reed in Winnemucca, Nevada. On the topic of
web-based aids, there\'s been several efforts to develop support tools
for development of the document, review and tracking of the document. Is
that an area that you plan to recommend a Bureau-wide effort had that
full support? The past efforts have been lightly supported by the states
they were developed in like turbo NEPA and I think there was one
developed in Ridgecrest years ago.\
\
C. Humphrey: Is anybody on from Colorado that\'s working on the E
planning? No. There is an E-planning effort under way, you know about
that?\
\
D. Stout: Perhaps one of our specialists in the other room would know.\
\
C. Humphrey: Gregg Simmons, are you on? Do you want to talk about the
E-planning?\
\
Sure. The E-planning is \-- it\'s an I.T. project that is currently
under way. There was a notification just recently that the pilot up in
Alaska is currently up on a website. We can probably get that website
and get it out to folks, Terry, if you haven\'t seen it yet.\
\
C. Humphrey: Does that answer your question?\
\
Caller: Well, the question really is, does the Bureau plan to develop a
fully supported automated tool to help in the development, review and
tracking of NEPA documents.\
\
C. Humphrey: That\'s what that E-planning is about.\
\
Caller: And if that\'s an I.T. sanctioned project \--\
\
C. Humphrey: Hang on. Greg, go ahead.\
\
Pat Green in the Washington Office is the project manager for the
E-planning, and it\'s too bad that the Washington Office isn\'t on,
because they could give you some rundown on the schedule. But it is a
national project to

bring it all together, and it\'s focusing right now on land use plan
development.\
\
C. Humphrey: But I think it\'s supposed to go into other NEPA documents,
isn\'t it?\
\
That\'s correct.\
\
D. Stout: Terry, we did talk about automated approaches to building NEPA
documents and some things like that and you\'re surely aware of the Las
Vegas effort to allow review and so forth on the web \-- or the
Internet. So, anyway, hopefully we\'re moving that direction.\
\
C. Humphrey: And are you all familiar with the BLM\'s NEPA planning
library? If we could have that website up on screen, if you have the \--
Kim, do you have the website? There it is on the bottom of the screen.
It\'s a planning and NEPA library that the Colorado State Office is
working on, and that shows examples of different planning and NEPA
documents, and if we do get some sort of an automated process, there
might be a link to that website. I\'m not sure if there is now. So that
was one of the things in our web-based job aids section.\
\
D. Stout: Another housekeeping thing, Cathy. I just got a fax, but it\'s
blank. So whoever sent it, if you want to try it again, maybe we can
answer a question, if that\'s what it really was. Any additional
comments on the strategy?\
\
Caller: This is Joe in Roseburg. I was wondering if you could address a
little about how you plan to eval \--\
\
C. Humphrey: Stop, stop. Joe in Roseburg, is that what it was? You came
in first.\
\
Caller: I was wondering if you could address the existing university
training and what you plan to be passing on in terms of recommendations
there.\
\
C. Humphrey: Who was that in our group that was talking about that?\
\
D. Stout: That was sort of me. Some of these are sort of conceptual
things. But one thought was that new employees that we hire out
universities often have no awareness or familiarity with NEPA because of
the course of study that they\'re in, yet as soon as we hire them,
they\'re ready \-- not ready, but they\'re asked to jump right into the
NEPA process. So one idea might be to have some key BLM people go to
universities in a senior level class and spend a week with the class,
assuming that some of those people will be interested in working for the
BLM and would eventually apply for jobs to discuss the NEPA process and
how the BLM deals with it, and at the same time kind of scope out the
possibilities for recruitment to see if there\'s some good people that
we might want to recruit and try and hire on. That\'s one aspect of it.
The SCP program again is another aspect. And some of this is related to
people in fields that aren\'t normally NEPA or planning related, perhaps
more of the sciences like range science or wildlife biology. We also
need to be looking in the universities for people that have backgrounds
in environmental sciences, in planning, that sort of thing, who would
normally gravitate toward a career in NEPA or planning kinds of things.
So that\'s one aspect of it. Is that enough information or do you need
more?\
\
Caller: That gives me a general idea. I second that looking for people
with good writing \-- technical writing especially and analysis type
skills are probably the key things there.\
\
D. Stout: We agree. We talked about that quite a bit and that would
definitely be something to be watching for.\
\
C. Humphrey: Now, who else? There was one or two other people that were
talking at the same time. Who else was trying to push to talk?\
\
Caller: This is Greg, Utah State Office.\
\
C. Humphrey: Hi, Greg.\
\
Caller: Yes, I could just add on your training with the universities
that Utah state and Duke university now have NEPA certification
programs. Those programs are being prepared in concert with outside
consultants, and so those are available to send students to and they
will arrange to place those where you need them. They\'ll come out to
the field and teach if you have enough people interested and you have
the money to fund such an effort. Also on the networking idea that you
have here, I\'d like to add that I think it would be a good idea to make
this interagency. The Forest Service and the BLM in Utah have often
talked and worked together in putting together NEPA courses and
instruction and it\'s helpful to have all of the agencies work together
similar to what the Federal leadership forum discussion was about.\
\
C. Humphrey: Great idea. Thanks, Greg.\
\
Caller: This is Terry reed again in Winnemucca. We might suggest to the
natural resource institutions that we often hire from that a requirement
for a natural resource graduate be an internship with an agency that
includes the actual development of a NEPA document in that office.\
\
C. Humphrey: We talked about that, didn\'t we?\
\
D. Stout: Yeah, we kind of touched on that. I know in billings, Montana,
John Thompson in the State Office has been using interns to do exactly
that and he has used people from local universities and brings them into
his office and gives them assignments just like you have described,
Terry, so that\'s a pretty successful program, and I bet that John would
be willing to talk to somebody if they wanted to call him up and inquire
how he does it. But it certainly could be expanded past billings and
used wherever a university is maybe close at hand.\
\
Caller: Joe Ross again in Roseburg and I just wanted to comment on
something regarding web based and networking and the fact that some
programs that develop list serves or discussion groups or bulletin
boards and they don\'t get a lot of use but perhaps within the NEPA
program if there was a system set up where we could be doing more
electronic networking and sharing ideas and asking questions and getting
mentoring online from experts, that might be a thing to think about.\
\
D. Stout: That\'s a good point, and Terry Dickens on our team from Rock
Springs was very interested in this topic and she repeatedly reminded us
about bulletin boards and those kinds of things. We do have it in our
notes, we just didn\'t have enough space to put all the little bullets
up for you to review. That will be a really useful tool, I think.\
\
Caller: Karl in Casper. Also we might reflect on upon that the
opportunity for faculty development and capacity building, opportunities
that may exist, say, with historically black college and universities,
HCBUs that in many cases with just a little bit of money the faculty
would be interested in coming and working in our offices or for a short
time or developing projects with their students that might support our
NEPA effort.\
\
C. Humphrey: That\'s a great idea. Thanks, Karl.\
\
D. Stout: Any other strategy-related comments? Let\'s turn it over to
Cathy and she can discuss the priorities for training modules that
we\'ve come up with.\
\
C. Humphrey: Thanks, Dave. Ok. What we came up with, we identified, of
course, we know there\'s a need for a basic EA and a basic EIS training
course. We just hired a contractor to do a basic EA course, and so we
didn\'t include in that our list. We\'ve already got plans to build a
basic EIS course and so what we talked about mostly was advanced
training and what it came out was is little modules, and we talked a
little bit about how they would be delivered, whether it would be
something like this, a push-to-talk type system, or whether it would be
web based or what. So what we\'re going to show you is the top \-- we
came up with about 10 different modules we thought were priorities and
we\'re only going to talk about today the A priorities and the B, the
high and the moderate priorities. So if we could get those up on the
screen. The A priorities include developing a range of alternatives,
developing public involvement, conducting effects analysis, including
direct and indirect, especially cumulative effects and reasonably
foreseeable development scenarios, how to write great adaptive
management decisions and then also how to write an EIS would be on that
top priority list. Our moderate priorities are our B list of priorities.
That includes documentation of NEPA adequacy, which is a somewhat \--
it\'s a new-ish process in the BLM and some folks are still having
trouble with that. How to write FONSIs, decision records and records of
decision. How to respond to appeals and protests and litigation and how
that whole protest and appeal process works. Then how to write clear
management direction for alternatives. So you can see some overlap in
these, and we haven\'t talked yet about how to lump the modules. Again,
we haven\'t talked about how to \-- exactly how they would be delivered,
but these were the top two groups of priorities that we had talked
about. This afternoon what we\'re going to do is we\'re going to talk a
little bit more about how we\'re going to develop those modules and how
\-- whether they would be combined or how they would be chunked, but for
now we would like to have some input from you folks on what you think of
those priorities. If you can think of additional priorities, just what
do you think about those lists? And I don\'t know \--\
\
Caller: This is Greg in Utah again. I think that those are the basic
ideas and concepts for NEPA, but I\'ve been called on to teach some
units on NEPA in some of the NTC courses by program, for example, in
rights-of-way, withdrawals, the pipeline course and so on, and
invariably the students said they got a lot out of that but they could
definitely use a lot more time. So I would think that we would need to
put together some modules which would incorporate NEPA into the program
time frames for each of the programs.\
\
C. Humphrey: We did talk about that and that\'s on our list of \-- under
our training strategy. Like Dave said, we have a bunch of bullets under
each item in the training strategy \-- or the NEPA strategy, and that is
one of the ones that we talked about with training, developing some
modules to insert into some of those other basic courses. We also talked
about the lands academy. There\'s a NEPA module until there. We talked
about revamping that a little bit. Making it equivalent or the same
level as the basic EA course we\'re starting to deliver. That\'s a great
idea. Thanks, Greg.\
\
Caller: Hello, this is Edie again. I might add, as one of those
priorities, I\'m not sure in what category, tools for managing large
projects, because that\'s a real difficult task, including contracts. I
don\'t know if that falls under need. But just something for large EISs
and large plans is always challenging.\
\
C. Humphrey: Edie, are you familiar with your project management for
planners course?\
\
Caller: Yes, but \-- I mean, just in general for EISs and for people
that may not take that course, it seems to me like that there\'s some
tools that you can make available that \-- like on the web or that would
be like sort of subsets of that larger course that are part of EIS and
managing contracts that are appropriate to this for EISs as opposed to
overall project management.\
\
C. Humphrey: You have to any specific \-- you were talking about tools.
Do you have any ideas for what types of tools you\'re talking about?
Edie, do you know what type of tools you\'re talking about? Can you give
me any examples?\
\
Caller: Yeah, the \-- I\'m thinking of electronic tools, templates and,
you know, I \-- I have a\' developed some templates of my own. I\'m not
sure\' they are the most effective or efficient templates. I can share
them with you.\
\
C. Humphrey: Have you thought about \--\
\
Caller: I\'m basically thinking about templates, standard language for
contracts.\
\
C. Humphrey: Have you thought about putting those templates on the
planning and NEPA library, the website?\
\
Caller: Well, I\'m not sure if I have the best ones.\
\
C. Humphrey: Well, they\'re just examples. This just in, we have a fax
coming in.\
\
Caller: This is John Thompson. I just thought that it might be a good
idea if we could develop some kind of a NEPA planning course catalog
where we would describe what courses are currently available and
indicate where it\'s available, whether it\'s within BLM or offered by
other agencies or maybe through a contractor, maybe talk a little bit
about a description of those courses and if there\'s any prerequisites
that would be necessary and if we could put that on the planning and
NEPA library, then people could use that to kind of figure out what
would be available to them if they needed special training, NEPA-related
training to do their work.\
\
C. Humphrey: Thanks, John. Karl, are you still on, Karl Oswald? Karl,
are you still there in Casper? I was thinking maybe that group, the
Federal leadership forum, might be doing something like that. But I\'ll
check with him later. Thanks, John. Any other comments on training?\
\
Caller: Kathy?\
\
C. Humphrey: Go ahead.\
\
Caller: Karl Oswald in Casper. I was just going to add another thing
that might be considered and has been done in the GIS realm, and that
might be to come up with these modules having a recommended curriculum
or topical outline of concepts and areas which if for nothing else the
people in the field could put these together as justifications for a
range of training sources whether it be from contractors or from NTC or
whatever.\
\
C. Humphrey: That\'s what John was saying?\
\
D. Stout: Sort of, I think. Maybe we can have John comment on that again
if that\'s what he was \--\
\
C. Humphrey: John, is that similar to what you were talking about, John
Thompson?\
\
Caller: Yeah, that would be similar.\
\
D. Stout: Let me jump in with this fax we got from the Medford office in
Oregon. A suggestion made for a training module which was the proper
carrying of an EA to a programmatic EIS and that whole concept of
tiering is important and certainly should be in any sort of training, I
would think, at least the basic training, and so whether it\'s a module
or \-- separately or part of something, that\'s definitely something
that needs noon there, I think.\
\
C. Humphrey: Yeah, great idea.\
\
D. Stout: We\'ll note and that add it to our list.\
\
Caller: This is Joe here in Roseburg and I had a couple entry-level fish
biologists had to get trained quickly and didn\'t have the luxury of
sending them to the technical writing course, so I sent them to a
reviewing NEPA documents course and they gave me some pretty good
feedback from that perspective and I don\'t see that really listed in
your list and the people that actually review these documents might need
some training along those lines, too. I think it did help with my
entry-level folks.\
\
C. Humphrey: I think that came up \-- in the needs assessment I think
that came up as one of the training needs. It didn\'t come out as one of
our highest priorities, but we\'ll add that to our list and consider it
with the other stuff. Thanks.\
\
Caller: This is Jerry in Oregon.\
\
C. Humphrey: There was a woman that came in first, but then I heard
Jerry\'s name in Oregon. So, Jerry, why don\'t you go ahead because I\'m
not sure hoot woman was that pushed in.\
\
Caller: I didn\'t want to knock somebody off. I was just going to say, I
imagine it was a pretty difficult choice to break these into high and
moderate priorities. I was just going to let you know that we seem \--
administrative remedies seem to be kind of picking up as a point where
\-- where we now have that memo that\'s been kicking around for about a
year in Washington related to planning, but we\'re also finding when we
don\'t make a clear distinction between NEPA analyses and decisions that
people seem to think the level of NEPA analysis decides the
administrative remedy, not thinking about the decision itself. We have
some believing if you do an EA or categorical he can collusion, and that
doesn\'t have anything to do with the decision. I see that as being a
bigger issue as time goes on here.\
\
C. Humphrey: We could include that in with the responding to appeals,
protests, litigation, all that. That could be lumped in with that. So
thanks, Jerry.\
\
C. Humphrey: And who \--\
\
Caller: A topic that we\'re interested \-- this is Carol from Eugene and
a topic we would be interest in learning about is streamlining the EAs.
Recently CEQ in the middle of December came out with some direction
stating that the EAs should be somewhere between 10 and 15 pages and
this is significantly shorter than our EAs are now and even if we might
not get them to be that short, we would like some guidance and direction
on \-- from your office on how to streamline them, how to make them a
lot shorter, especially in the areas of analysis.\
\
C. Humphrey: Well, you are so lucky, because the EA course that we just
contracted \-- we hired ETCI out of Denver. We just hired them to start
conducting our basic EA training. One of the things she really
emphasizes is streamlining EAs and she has a lot of different tools and
techniques for. Did you say you are in Eugene? We\'ve got a course
coming to Salem. I don\'t think we\'ve scheduled it. I don\'t think
it\'s this spring. It might be in the fall. But sometime soon we\'ve got
that course coming to Salem. So maybe you could attend or some people
from your office could attend that. Because that\'s one of the things we
wanted to emphasize in that class. So thanks. Other comments on
training?\
\
Caller: This is Ken \--\
\
This is Paul in Roseburg.\
\
C. Humphrey: Hang on.\
\
D. Stout: Or Kent.\
\
Caller: This is Kent in white river. I\'m just wondering as far as your
delivery technique, you know, one of the keys to successful NEPA is
interdisciplinary team approach and are you thinking of perhaps creating
these modules so you can come to my office and provide my team, as far
as consistency, if everybody\'s at the same level, then I have a good
opportunity for success.\
\
We are doing with that EA course. We\'re doing that with the planning
course. Some of the other courses that we have we\'re doing that with.
These modules, these specific modules, we haven\'t talked how we\'re
going to do those. One idea would be to come to your office, another
idea would be to do some type of interactive satellite like this with
your whole office. If we could do the computer based whatever, but we
agree that it is helpful if the whole office can be trained at the same
time. So with the EA course we are doing that. Beyond that we haven\'t
discussed with the modules how that\'s going to work out.\
\
Caller: Just quickly there, I think the satellite interaction, that
would work fine.\
\
C. Humphrey: Thanks. And who else was \-- did you hear who else \--
somebody else was trying to push in at that same time.

Caller: This is Paul in Roseburg. I was just going to respond to what
Eugene had to say. We\'ve all heard how long CEQ thinks an EA should be
and that\'s well and good as long as you\'re able to cover all the
issues. In addition to writing EAs, I deal with protest and appeal
responses, so I guess it\'s a question of the level of comfort that the
individual as far as streamlining an EA but still being able to
adequately address all the bases so if that it goes to an appeal
they\'re going to be able to defend it before the board.\
\
C. Humphrey: Exactly. And I was with a group of people that met in Salt
Lake in December regarding that streamlining the EA process with CEQ\'s
memo that came out, and they\'re talking specifically about fuels
reduction treatment projects. It was BLM, Forest Service, BIA, National
Park Service, Fish\
& Wildlife Service met in Salt Lake City and what we did is we \-- there
was, I think, 10 projects across the agencies, fuel reduction projects,
they\'re writing EAs for those projects and they\'re trying some
streamlining techniques. That group will be meeting again, I think in
May, sometime this late spring to talk about how the process went and
how to streamline documents and from that might come some tips. But
you\'re exactly right. You have to cover the bases you need to cover,
but some EAs we\'ve seen some people are writing more than they need to
be writing. Is there a fax that came in?\
\
D. Stout: There is. Actually the Wyoming State Office is on with us, but
they seem to be having some technical difficulties. Just a comment that
it\'s hard to listen running to the fax machine to send in a question,
which \-- seems pretty \-- anyway, I don\'t know, this is probably kind
of late now to try to fix push-to-talk in the State Office, but we
certainly need to figure out what\'s going wrong and get it repaired for
the next time.\
\
C. Humphrey: Were you on when we were ting \-- you can\'t answer me, if
you were on when we did the check and there was a phone number that was
on the screen \--\
\
D. Stout: Kim is going to put that up quickly here so you can dial in
directly. . This one on the screen, you can dial into and get your
push-to-talk repaired while you\'re online. They\'ll help you sort it
out. I was not exactly correct saying it might be a little too late. Try
that number and see if you can\'t get it fixed real fast before the
telecast is finished.\
\
Caller: This is Joe here and just another comment. I assume that any
training you have will start with a good grounding of the actual law and
having anybody that takes this training get refreshed with what the law
says, what the regulations say and basically go from there. The
trainings I\'ve been to also try to incorporate actual examples of
people\'s writings from different documents and they get heavily into
critiquing those and pointing out specific reasons why something could
have been done better or worse or whatever. I guess at this time I\'ll
just say a quick hello to John and Greg, guys I worked with back in the
\'70s on 14 different EISs in Portland. . Yeah, with that EA course that
we\'ve developed, the first thing she does is has people actually read
NEPA, which is kind of exciting and they talk about section 101 and 102.
They go through some of the definitions and play a little \-- kind of a
game to test each other on the definitions. She\'s also getting several
examples of BLM EAs and I\'m also looking for examples of BLM EAs. So if
anybody wants to e-mail me an example EA, we can use that in the course.
We don\'t use the whole EA, just pieces and parts. We use some for good
examples, some for examples that need improvement. So if you want to
send me any examples, that\'s what we\'re doing. So it looks like we\'re
on exactly the same path you were talking about.\
\
D. Stout: I\'ll deal with this fax for a second here. It\'s from the
Wyoming State Office. They\'ve figured another way to get ahold of us
and this is from Janet and Janet, you\'re questioning relative to
professional development about the job series, the X118 qualifications
for people who are in the NEPA field. We did discuss this in our
session. We talked about revising position descriptions to include a
NEPA requirement \-- or a function, I guess you could say. For those of
you out there, Janet\'s asking about the \-- making this \-- having a
positive education requirement for NEPA people, and the community
planner series 020 has a positive education requirement and some NEPA
people are in that series. Many of our NEPA people are in environmental
protection specialists, which doesn\'t. So that might be something for
further discussion, including the personnel people, to see if we can\'t
get more positive firm requirements, the positive education requirements
into these position descriptions so we\'re hiring people that have
training closely related to the field of NEPA or land use planning.\
\
C. Humphrey: On the cover of that fax it says you can\'t hear us. I
thought it said you can\'t heal us. We have a phone call in. So hello?\
\
Caller: Are you connected?\
\
C. Humphrey: We can hear you.\
\
Caller: Ok. A couple of items about training. Something I don\'t see
that I think is important and NEPA calls for an interdisciplinary
process and we seem to be focused on multi-disciplinary and lead-in
projects as opposed to building teams and working in an
interdisciplinary team fashion. I can also see that things like the
endangered species act and the cultural resources and the national
historic preservation act, two key pieces of legislation and items
mentioned specifically in NEPA the ability to work within those two
disciplines in an interdisciplinary fashion, I really think if there\'s
a way to incorporate that into the NEPA training, I think that would be
fabulous. It\'s critical and I see a lot of multi-disciplinary work. I
don\'t see a lot of interdisciplinary work. That\'s my comment.\
\
C. Humphrey: Is this Janet from Wyoming?\
\
Caller: It is.\
\
C. Humphrey: Hi, Janet. We did talk about \-- one of the modules we did
talk about was how to run an interdisciplinary team, working with the
public, working within your office, conflict management, communication
skills, that type of thing. So we\'re looking at possibly making that a
module. It\'s a little bit \-- piece of the courses of the EA course
we\'ve got but it\'s not a real heavy emphasis on it. So that was the
one thing. And so we do talk a little bit about interdisciplinary versus
multi-disciplinary and then as far as the other laws, that\'s definitely
a part of the EA course, it\'s part of our planning courses and it will
be part of the EIS course. That came out \-- I can\'t remember how that
came out in our needs assessment. I think it came out fairly \-- as a
high importance and low skill. But it didn\'t \-- it didn\'t rate high
enough to come up on our list of items because we felt it was already
taken care of by other courses that are ongoing right now.\
\
Caller: Kathy, Karl Oswald in Casper. I just wanted to add a note to
that and that is a cooperating agency status is becoming an increasingly
important aspect of our NEPA work and you might want \-- you all might
want to think about maybe looking at the opportunities and challenges
that go with that.\
\
C. Humphrey: As a matter of fact, we also have a course that deals with
that. We\'ve just \-- I participated in a design, I think it was last
week, on a place-based NEPA course. It\'s a one-day \-- it\'s actually a
workshop. It\'s a one-day workshop on how the public and cooperating
agencies can participate in the NEPA process. So that \-- I think
they\'re starting deliveries in May. Tanya, are you on the line?\
\
Caller: Yeah, Cathy, I\'m here. We\'re looking \-- for the partnership
series, that\'s what the course runs through, we\'re looking to the
pilot in June, and then probably a month after that and then start doing
regular deliveries.\
\
C. Humphrey: Thanks, Tanya. As you probably know, Karl, there is the
Wyoming State Office and state agencies and I can\'t remember who else,
a bunch of interagency folks have been meeting together to build that
type of a course for Wyoming. Does anybody in Wyoming that can
communicate with us care to comment on that? Bill Daniels is involved
with that but he\'s in the State Office and they can\'t talk to us. So,
anyway, yes, Karl, we\'re working on that one also. Janet, sorry we got
cut off with you. If you had an additional question, we have a couple
minutes left, if you wanted to call back in. Are there any other
comments while we\'re waiting to see if Janet needs to call back in?\
\
Caller: This is Greg in Utah again. I was just wondering if you have any
involvement from, say, the Solicitor level in telling us what we should
have in analysis and documentation and so on for all of these courses.\
\
C. Humphrey: Do you want to talk about the thing from Brad or do you
want me to?\
\
D. Stout: Well, you can.\
\
C. Humphrey: I used to work up in Oregon and I\'m very familiar with the
Solicitors up there and the Forest Service. The Forest Service lawyers
also. We have talked quite a bit with them in the past on what sort of
things we should include, and one of the things we considered when
building our training strategy was a paper that Brad GRENHAN, who is in
the Solicitor\'s office in Portland, and it was six ways to avoid a NEPA
challenge. He was looking at all the ways we were getting challenged
and, I think, losing challenges up in the northwest. He was saying if
you \-- these are the things that you need to stop doing or start doing.
Those were some of the things Dave was going over earlier in the
program. So in answer to your question, yes, we have involved the
solicitors. We just have not involved them lately. So that\'s something
we could do. Thanks, Greg.\
\
D. Stout: Anybody else want to offer anything before we move on? Let\'s
move on.\
\
C. Humphrey: Now we want to just talk a little bit about what\'s next,
and if we could go back to the Elmo here and look at this chart again
and as you recall, we had all this information, went into our NEPA
strategy meeting. We\'re right here. We\'ll take all the information
from all this stuff, including your input, and then we\'ll start
building, revising, looking at these courses. It\'s a little crooked
there. Anyway this, afternoon we were going to meet with the NEPA
Strategy Team for another couple hours \-- I can hear groans in the
background \-- and we\'re going to talk about time lines and how we\'re
going to build the modules, maybe some of the chunking, refine the
prioritization a little bit based on what you all told us today and in
the future we\'re going to talk about how to build these courses. If
there\'s a vendor out there or university that already has a course
that\'s exactly what we\'re looking for, it would be a little ridiculous
for us to build it. So we\'re either looking at buying some from
vendors, modifying them, build our own, modifying our own, several
different ways. And as I\'ve talked about a couple times, we\'ve already
begun our NEPA training strategy. We built that new three-day EA course.
We have several locations this year. It\'s going to be held in grand
junction at the end of April, Farmington in May, rock springs in May,
Boise in June, I\'m trying to schedule something for Salem and northeast
California this fiscal year and then next fiscal year and the outyears
we will be scheduling more courses, more of the EA courses also. In
addition, we\'ve got that place-based NEPA workshop, that one-day
workshop I talked about and we\'re also working on a couple other things
like environmental conflict management that works into this and I was
talking with the Forest Service about they\'ve got a course that\'s how
to write statements of work. I think it\'s performanced based statements
of work. So we\'re going to be coordinating on and that seeing if
that\'s something we want to offer and collaborate with them on. I was
hoping that Scott or especially Katie in the Washington Office was
listening to this so they could realize they need to keep sending us
money so we can keep providing these courses for you all. So, are there
any fine comments or questions before we close out the program from the
audience?\
\
Caller: Kathy, this is Utah and I\'m wondering if built into your basic
NEPA course if you have some kind of a module to discuss the
administrative file and what needs to be in that?\
\
C. Humphrey: Yes, we do. That\'s part of it. In addition to that, the
Washington Office is working on an instructional memorandum. I\'m
providing ladle information for that also. I think \-- not sure when it
should be coming out. I know ELI ELAN is on a detail right now but when
he comes back he will be working on that. It will be part of that
course.\
\
Caller: Cathy, have you considered \--\
\
C. Humphrey: Hang on. John, you came in first. John Thompson.\
\
Caller: Yeah, I would just like to encourage everybody on this broadcast
if they\'ve taken courses that they think are especially good or could
be helpful, maybe they could e-mail Cathy the name of those courses and
a summary or at least the name of the course and who provided that
course, whether it was another agency or maybe BLM long in the past or
if it was provided by a contractor so that it would help us develop
these courses in the future and we don\'t duplicate things already
done.\
\
C. Humphrey: Somebody tried to talk about web-based something.\
\
Caller: This is Edie again. I was wondering if you had considered
web-based template for the administrative report both for planning
documents and EISs.\
\
C. Humphrey: I\'m not sure exactly how much that\'s been talked about. I
know we developed on a project we worked on, we developed a database,
and we had a form for the administrative record. We had a form that
everybody filled out, and that information was put into the \-- into an
access database, and from that you could track the record very easily.
It had a summary of what each item was. You could find where it was and
you could print out the whole database. If you\'re interested in that, I
can send you \-- well, I can fell you all the website \-- we don\'t have
it written on anything, but it\'s WWW.ICBEMP.GOV/ICBDB, and the first
thing that pops up, it will say user name and password. The user name is
plus and the password is plus. You can get on there and we have a
database for comments, content analysis, one for the admin record and
one for a \-- what do you call the list that the \-- you keep a list of
\-- you send out things to people \--\
\
D. Stout: A mailing list.\
\
C. Humphrey: Thank you. A mailing list. So we have several databases on
there. So that might help you a little bit. Other than that \--
actually, on the E-planning \-- I\'m not sure if that\'s part of
E-planning or not.\
\
Caller: This is Greg. Yes, it is. It\'s one of the major components of
the E-planning project, and I did recall that the e-mail or \-- or the
\-- yeah, the e-mail address, not the e-mail address, but the website
address was mailed out to all of the planning \-- State Office planners
and they should be able to get that address out to the field offices
that have not received it as of yet, but that pilot project is up there
and has been up for about a month now, I believe, maybe over a month.
The one up in Alaska.\
\
Caller: This is Jim beaver in Montana. How are you doing?\
\
C. Humphrey: Good.\
\
Caller: Well, I would like to reemphasize that planning NEPA library.
Here in Montana we have been putting communication plans and prep plans
and Federal register notices and notice of availabilities and I\'m sure
that we could put EAs, good example EAs and a lot of things on there,
and our folks here in Montana are really utilizing appear lot and
getting a lot out of it and I think it\'s a very, very good place to
have a lot of examples for people to look at so they don\'t have to
reinvent the wheel and they\'re getting good examples of these different
types of things.\
\
C. Humphrey: Yes, you guys there have definitely been the most active on
putting things on that website lately, that library. So if we don\'t
have any other comments I guess we will \-- let\'s see. I guess that\'s
about it for today. So, Dave, do you have any closing comments before we
close out here?\
\
D. Stout: Well, I do. Maybe it\'s a bit of a commercial, but I\'ll say
it anyway. And that is that the NEPA process and also land use planning
are the building blocks on which we base nearly all of our work. To
accomplish our work effectively and efficiently we need to be familiar,
to really be comfortable with the NEPA process. To reach this end,
we\'ve started down the road today to improve effectiveness and
efficiency by identifying a vision and a strategy and by providing the
bases for developing training. We have your involvement in the process
and hope that you\'ll continue to be involved. All of us on the NEPA
Strategy Team thank you for taking time to join us today and share
information with us and I\'ll turn it back over to you.

C. Humphrey: So I want to emphasize again to please feel free to call me
or e-mail me if you have any additional comments or questions. There\'s
my e-mail address and my phone number up there. Jot it down. And we\'re
still curious to get input from you. We know we\'ve given you a lot of
information, and as I said before, we\'re going to send a summary of our
proposed strategy to those of you that registered for the session or
those of you that we know were on this session, and if you haven\'t
either registered or if we don\'t know that you\'re on here, you can
talk to your state planning and NEPA leads because we\'ll keep them
informed on what we\'re doing and our progress and we want to thank you
for joining us. We know that you have very busy schedules and we
appreciate your time and hope it was worth it. So thanks.