PVHP looks for public feedback

Members of the community met to discuss the future of the Platte Valley Habitat Partnership (PVHP) and the Mule Deer Habitat Plan at the PVHP’s most recent meeting Feb. 19.

Voices of the Valley (VoV)Executive Director KayCee Alameda was the presenter at the meeting, which took place at the Platte Valley Community Center. Jim States, VoV board vice president, said the purpose of last week’s meeting was to educate others on the PVHP, and learn about how the public would like to move the organization along.

“The main purpose was to get as broad of representation of the partnership as we could in conversation, and talk about how do we, as a partnership and all of the stakeholders involved, move this forward,” he said. “How do we become the directing influence? That was the primary purpose.”

Attendees were asked “Recommendations you would make to improve the chances of success in implementing the plan”; “What needs now to happen (or not happen) in order to maintain your interest and involvement with PVHP”; “Roles you see for yourself and/or your stakeholder group in implementing this plan”; and “Anything else you would like to discuss.”

PVHP is working to involve the public to implement the Mule Deer Habitat Plan.

“We got general agreement that we need to move forward with the process of deciding what as a group, the PVHP, needs to do,” he said. “We talked about what kind of roles it needs to play in order to implement the plan and meet the goal that we’ve set for ourselves, which is to improve the numbers and quality of mule deer in the Valley. It’s a very tall order, so what we’ll do next is summarize what was discussed here tonight, provide it back to this group.”

States said he now looks forward to the Mule Deer Initiative meeting at 6 p.m. March 3 at the Saratoga Town Hall.

“We’ll start trying to take some definite steps to organize with Voices of the Valley and Game and Fish, and provide a structural framework,” he said. “Now this group will decide how it’s going to step up and take charge of the whole process going forward. I think we got what we needed out of this meeting, so now we’ll take the next step and start talking about what I would call organization development. We’ll talk about how as an organization we want to grow into the role of guiding the whole Platte Valley habitat improvement.”

With the amount of input during the comment period, States said he was happy to see so many people unafraid to share their thoughts, feelings and opinions.

“This is the first time in quite a while that we’ve been able to get people in a group like this to actually say what they’re thinking about, outside of voting on issues,” he said. “We actually got people to get into a dialogue, and that’s always hard to do, but I think we made a good start to that. At the last meeting we asked ‘What do you want PVHP to become?’ and at that time no one was prepared to kick in. They either didn’t know, or more likely, weren’t prepared to step up and say so in front of the group, but tonight, ultimately nearly all of them stepped up and said what they were thinking, which is what we were hoping for.”

States said it was important to get the feedback from people living in the Platte Valley during the local PVHP meetings.

“The key stakeholders are landowners, including federal landowners and public landowners, the BLM, the Forest Service, plus the game and fish, which has the responsibility for managing the deer herd,” he said. “It happens that those will always be principal parties in whatever we do, but the missing piece is guidance from the people who live here in the Valley to help direct the whole thing, which is what we’re feeling our way toward. We’re trying to do that in a way that is efficient in an organizational sense, but that is also inclusive as it has been all along, especially with landowners, both public and private. They’ve got to know they have a major say in how this goes because they’re the landowners and the water owners, and you can’t do anything without land or water in terms of habitat improvement.”