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Project Goals/Messaging
Goals of the Waterways Management Plan are to:
- Outline a county-wide and city-wide vision for waterways management and identify waterway-specific goals and desired future condition to provide a framework for future decision making.
- Provide a variety of recreational experiences consisting of a system of lakes, reservoirs, and rivers with a focus on Payette Lake, Lake Cascade, Warm Lake, and river reaches above Lake Cascade.
- Balance environmental sustainability with the recreational experience by developing keystone indicators based on best available scientific data and existing research.
- Consider trends in recreation, visitation, population growth, and land use and management.
- Create an adaptable management structure to address continued visitation and changing water quality with monitoring and indicators for the implementation of data-driven best management practices and regulations to maintain the desired future conditions of each waterway.
- Identify priorities for short-term action and long-term goals.
- Create a grassroots-based plan centered on our community, stakeholders, committees, agencies, and leadership.
Other benefits:
The Waterways Management Plan will:
- Create the management framework for recommendations and guidelines to preserve our quality of recreation as well as water quality.
- Provide a classification of waterways to form the basis of management guidelines.
- Provide a community-level document that can incorporate future research and monitoring from agencies and academia.
- Provide education on existing regulations already in place.
- Highlight best practices from other major recreation waterbodies across the nation within Idaho’s legal framework.
- Translate existing research into everyday language our community can understand.
- Be guided by a Steering Committee of elected leaders, Technical Advisory Committee of land and resource managers, stakeholders, and the community.
- Identify data gaps for future research.
- Outline recommendations in partnership with other agencies (USFS, IDL, State Parks, BOR, etc) for future management and policies considerations.
- Provide guidelines oriented towards the health and safety of recreational users.
- Provides recommendations for operations including enforcement.
- Provides general outline for capital improvement needed to enhance the recreational experience on the waterways.
- Identify funding sources for continued sustainable management by waterway.
What the Plan is not?
- Does not provide for any original environmental data collection on scientific measures (e.g. erosion, water pollutants, etc) as this is being collected by other agencies.
- Does not result in immediate restrictions or regulations.
- Is not lead by individuals or single special interest groups but community conversations.
- Does not include detailed design for recreation facilities as these will need further studies.
- Agency partners will be key to the plan development, but any policy or rule changes will be needed to be adopted by them through separate processes.
- Does not have a predetermined outcome.