The following are lessons I have learned from 20 years of experience as a consultant in watershed planning and management, including 10 years living and working in the Middle Fork Eel River Watershed, 5 years with the French Creek Watershed Advisory Group, and 3 years with the Scott River Watershed CRMP Committee in the Klamath River Basin.

 1. Using "CRMP" in the name of their group:

• Coordinated Resource Management Planning-CRMP is an adjective, not a noun; a process, not a product
• It's too much of a mouthful and not self-explanatory to the average person
• Saying "Crimp" connotes a negative feeling in some people, as "put a crimp in", which means "to thwart, or interfere with"; good source of jokes

• More than about 12 decision-making members is unwieldy and can lead to dysfunction
• Best to start small (6 or so) with an initial cross-section of interests and expand as needed; a group almost never shrinks once the "Pandora's Box" of membership has been opened.
• Use the full group for information sharing and brainstorming but delegate work (e.g., wordsmithing, fact-finding) to smaller subcommittees (3 to 7 members).
• Too many agency members (especially in uniform) can be intimidating to private landowners and interests and impede communication; use sparingly as members, but extensively as technical advisors.
• Involve broader participation through workshops, field trips, educational speakers, conferences, etc.

• Too many resource conflicts and issues exist in every watershed and they cannot be solved all at once with the limited energies and funds of the group.
• Identify the issues first, try to set priorities, do some initial fact-finding, have field trips together to examine issues, re-evaluate priorities, and select the top three. Put your energy then into the top one for at least a year - give it all you've got and put the others on the back burner. FOCUS - FOCUS - FOCUS ! Example of a #1 Priority for the Eel Basin: Road Management
• Monitor progress and celebrate every step of improvement since each little step counts.
• Be honest with yourselves about the mistakes and try, try again

• There's watersheds and there's watersheds; the scale should match the available information, interested landowners, scope of problem, personal energy, funds, etc.
• Yes, a lower watershed effort needs to coordinate with an upper watershed effort, but what happens in the South Fork Eel sub-basin does not hydrologically affect the Middle Fork Eel sub-basin.
• A watershed in the 20,000 to 40,000 acre size is ideal for a focused, community-level consensus group. Example: Tomki Creek Watershed Project near Willits
• Bigger does not mean better. Communication becomes more difficult and demanding over a large area and interests become more disparate.
• Use the Eel-Russian River Commission's meeting minutes and materials as a reference source as well as a continuing regional forum for information sharing.

• Long-term success with improved watershed management on a daily basis demands that the parties understand WHY change and improvement is needed or it won't be practiced once the group goes away.
• Better to perform fact-finding together than to have studies done for the group with recommendations pronounced to the group by experts.
• Win/win solutions are best: encourage cooperation and collaboration through incentives; carrot is better than the stick.

• Be clear what is expected of each member from the beginning; need to know when a member's behavior exceeds the bounds and is counter-productive to group's effort.
• Building trust is a critical objective of the CRMP process, and the rules should contribute to building trust among members.
• Willingness to be open-minded and to listen to each other is an essential rule.