Maine Initiative Provides Important Clues to Successful Watershed Stewardship and RCPP Project
Portland, Maine’s source water protection program holds some important clues and lessons for those in the Southeast seeking to strengthen forest stewardship for drinking water.
Sebago Lake is the main drinking water supply for over 200,000 people in Portland, making the health of this watershed critical to providing clean water to the greater Portland community. The Maine watershed initiative, Sebago Clean Waters, is recognized as a national model that stewards and protects critical forests for drinking water. The partnership that is now known as Sebago Clean Waters started twenty years ago in 2000 when the Portland Water district was approached by a land trust seeking donations to help conserve forest land in the watershed. Portland Water District decided it was in their interests to conserve the land and donated $10,000.
This first donation led to other forest land conservation projects and by 2007 partners had protected 366 acres. By 2012 partners conserved 1,600 acres and started a formal forest land conservation program that included selection criteria and dedicated funding. Over time this partnership continued to grow and in 2017 six different organizations, along with the two original land trusts, became Sebago Clean Waters. These organizations brought more tools, skills, and fundraising ability to the partnership, and with their experience in land conservation, helped build their capacity.
Since the beginning of their formal partnership as Sebago Clean Waters they have conserved almost 6,000 acres and received a grant from the Healthy Watersheds Consortium. This grant enabled them to get funding specifically for the partnership, hire a coordinator and a communications specialist, and start formally meeting more often. This strengthening and further organization of their partnership led them to apply to the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) for an $8 million dollar RCPP (Regional Conservation Partnership Program) grant awarded in 2020. The grant award includes an expectation that they will conserve another 10,000 acres over the next five years using the funds, and they are confident that they will!
The five-year U.S. Department of Agriculture NRCS RCPP grant will aid forest conservation, aquatic habitat improvements, land stewardship, landowner outreach, and help Sebago Clean Waters to meet its goal of protecting 25 percent of land in the Sebago watershed in the next 15 years. Portland Water District, lead partner for the grant, will manage the grant funds for Sebago Clean Waters’ partners.
To learn more about this grant, we spoke with Karen Young, Coordinator for Sebago Clean Waters, and Paul Hunt, Environmental Services Manager at Portland Water District, about the RCPP proposal process and the successes and challenges they had with it.
One of the first things that both Paul and Karen mentioned was the NRCS grant application process. Karen stressed that one of the keys to applying for the grant is how you translate your vision into the language and structure of NRCS. The NRCS RCPP grant application portal can be difficult to navigate and it can be challenging to compartmentalize complex aspects of your project into drop-down menus and boxes. Karen noted, “I think that it’s harder than writing your proposal and vision for five years. It’s harder to break it down into these bite size pieces.”
Paul told us that working with their state conservationist early on in the project concept phase helped them not only to translate their vision well, but also to formulate a strong and holistic proposal to submit to the NRCS. When they first met with their state conservationist they had put together a proposal oriented towards conservation, as they thought that NRCS’s focus was easements. It was their state conservationist, Juan Hernandez, who encouraged them to think differently. Juan showed them that it actually was the reverse of what they thought, and that the NRCS wanted to see their vision of how a healthy watershed functions and what elements of conservation work were needed. This led them to look to their partners and use their different strengths to encompass more forms of conservation in their proposal.
Paul told us, “If we are successful, and we will be, in conserving 35,000 acres, that will still leave 75% of the watershed as un-conserved land. So there has to be conservation activities happening on all that other land. Yes, it will be nice to have 25 percent of the watershed kind of “in the bank” as protected and managed forest but there is still going to be a lot of other land that is privately owned and is being used by people in different ways. How are we going to keep that healthy as well? We built that into the proposal. That was unexpected, and that was really why it was helpful to meet with the state conservationist early on. He helped us modify our proposal so that he felt it would be more competitive when all the NRCS graders looked at it, and he was right.”
Paul said that when they saw that the Farm Bill had been reauthorized in 2018 and that Congress had specifically required that 10% of many NRCS funding opportunities should go towards source water protection, Sebago Clean Waters and Portland Water District knew they had to apply. Their project seemed to be exactly what the NRCS was looking for. However, Karen and Paul both stressed that years of partnership building was one of the crucial things that prepared them for the grant. The partnership has officially been working together with all nine partners since 2017, but the momentum towards where they are now has been building for the last 20 years, starting with Portland Water District’s first contribution to a land conservation project in the watershed 20 years ago.
Karen said, “I think that is one of the strengths to our proposal. We have been working together already for a number of years and we know each other well. We know each other's work well and we see how it all fits together. We have been building up to this point, building our internal capabilities, building our relationships with landowners, and we were at a point where we were ripe for taking on a big opportunity like this.”
Having a compelling message and vision also helped to strengthen their proposal. Their vision is focused around drinking water, and Karen cited surveys that show that one of the public's top environmental priorities is clean drinking water. She said that being able to highlight this as central to their proposal made for a really compelling message. She added, “Of course, having Portland Water District as our lead partner on the proposal just shouts it out: we are about drinking water!”
Sebago Clean Waters: https://www.sebagocleanwaters.org/
Portland Water District: https://www.pwd.org/
This article was orignally published along with our Spring 2021 newsletter on April 7th 2021.
Written by Deirdre Keough.