The Zion Regional Collaborative

Zion National Park in southern Utah is famed for its towering canyon walls and vivid red rocks. The canyons and mesas of Zion were originally preserved as a National Monument in 1909 and fell under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service upon the agency's formation in 1916. Since then, Zion has become one of the crown jewels of the National Park system and a major attraction for the state of Utah. Reflecting its increasing popularity as a tourist destination, the park has experienced dramatic increases in visitation in recent years, jumping from 2.6 million visitors in 2010 to 4.3 million visitors in 2016.

2017 The Zion Regional Collaborative Collaborative Planning for Transboundary Problem-Solving in Gateway Regions Dylan Corbin Corbin 1 Submitted for completion of the Masters of City and Metropolitan Planning Department of City and Metropolitan Planning University of Utah May 2017 Corbin 2 Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 3 The Current State of National Park Service Planning ........................................................ 8 Relevant Examples............................................................................................................ 12 Yosemite Tuolumne River Plan .................................................................................... 16 Cape Cod Transit Task Force ....................................................................................... 17 Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent .................................................................. 19 The Zion Regional Collaborative...................................................................................... 21 Lessons Learned................................................................................................................ 27 Conclusions ....................................................................................................................... 34 Next Steps for the Zion Regional Collaborative ........................................................... 34 Opportunities for Further Research .............................................................................. 35 Concluding Thoughts .................................................................................................... 37 Works Cited ...................................................................................................................... 38 Corbin 3 Introduction Zion National Park in southern Utah is famed for its towering canyon walls and vivid red rocks. The canyons and mesas of Zion were originally preserved as a National Monument in 1909 and fell under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service upon the agency's formation in 1916. Since then, Zion has become one of the crown jewels of the National Park system and a major attraction for the state of Utah. Reflecting its increasing popularity as a tourist destination, the park has experienced dramatic increases in visitation in recent years, jumping from 2.6 million visitors in 2010 to 4.3 million visitors in 2016. The addition of these millions of visitors to the region has created or exacerbated issues for the National Park Service (NPS), local communities, and other local public lands, particularly in the western corridor leading from Interstate 15 to Zion Canyon. During the busy summer months, severe traffic congestion, long lines for bathrooms and concessions, packed shuttle buses, illegal camping, and flared tempers have all become common occurrences. As part of a concerted regional effort to address the challenges facing the region, stakeholders there have begun participating in a collaborative working group called the Zion Region Collaborative (ZRC). Participants in this endeavor represent a wide swath of interests, including the NPS, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the gateway communities of Springdale and Rockville as well as Washington, Kane, and Iron Counties, local business and tourism groups, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), and non-profit advocacy organizations. As of early 2017, the ZRC is being facilitated by staff and graduate students from the University of Utah's Environmental Dispute Resolution (EDR) Program. The situation in the Zion region, however, is not entirely unique. Visitation to NPS sites has grown steadily throughout the agency's history. Recently, however, numerous National Corbin 4 Parks throughout the U.S. have witnessed exponential increases in the number of people passing through their gates, with many of the iconic, landscape scale parks seeing the greatest growth in visitation. This dramatic increase in the number of people visiting National Park sites has had widespread negative effects on the quality of the visitor experience. For example, in Yosemite, where 95% of visitors pack into the seven-by-one mile Yosemite Valley, park shuttles are overstuffed with hikers and sightseers, leading to frustration and flared tempers (Carlton, 2016). In Yellowstone, growing numbers of visitors posed a growing threat to the park's resources, with more people approaching wildlife, trampling thermal features, and littering (Glascock, 2016). Crater Lake in Oregon accommodated 23% more visitors in 2016 than 2015, along with a 45% increase in overnight backcountry visitors (Hale, 2017). In Acadia, another park that saw record visitation in 2016, Park Rangers were forced to undertake temporary closures of popular roads in response to summertime crowding (Trotter, 2016). On busy days at the Grand Canyon, visitors used a mile of toilet paper per stall at restrooms (Carlton, 2016). The impacts of this significant increase in visitation are not contained by park boundaries. This issue has important implications for housing affordability, employment opportunities, transportation, and community character in gateway communities. As with the case of Moab, Utah, this issue is taking a serious toll on the communities, public lands, and infrastructure surrounding the parks. In Moab, the gateway to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, the proliferation of vacation rentals has contributed to a housing affordability crisis in the town. The lack of affordable housing leads to difficulty in hiring a sufficiently large workforce, even for jobs like teachers, police officers, and healthcare professionals (O'Donoghue, 2016). Traffic flows into National Parks through gateway communities has forced action by many such communities to cope with traffic volumes much higher than expected for towns of Corbin 5 their size. Traffic bound for Rocky Mountain National Park has been acutely felt in gateway communities like Estes Park and Lyons, Colorado. The town of Estes Park chose to redesign the flow of traffic through its downtown in 2016, opting for a one-way couplet to "decrease congestion problems in downtown and improve access to Rocky Mountain National Park (Hindi, 2016). Similarly, the town of Lyons is engaging in traffic calming and stepped-up traffic enforcement in response to high volumes of traffic, limiting the police force's ability to address other issues in town. "It's very difficult for us as the sheriff's office when we're staffed at ‘X' amount to be able to address everything we have to address," Sergeant Bill Crist told the Longmont Times-Call (Arvesen, 2017). In the region around Zion National Park, the Town of Springdale is currently working on multiple parking interventions to address congestion and illegal parking; Washington County is currently looking into options for public transportation along the main gateway corridor; and the St. George (Utah) Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management is developing a new comprehensive travel management plan. The NPS is aware of these impacts on these surrounding communities and that NPS parks and monuments do not act as islands. For example, the NPS Advisory Board Science Committee recognized the need to work beyond park boundaries in its 2012 report, Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks, writing: . . 21st-century conservation challenges require an expansion in the spatial, temporal, and social scales of resource stewardship. A comprehensive national conservation land- and seascape includes working lands and waters, . . . recreation areas, historical sites, wilderness areas, wild and scenic rivers, and marine protected areas. Connecting isolated and Corbin 6 individual conservation sites into a network adds to their individual and collective resilience over time. Accordingly, the NPS and many park superintendents have taken action to engage with surrounding communities and stakeholders in addressing issues. In Arches, growing issues with traffic congestion and crowding has led the park to solicit public comments for methods to manage visitation (Maffly, 2016). In Yellowstone, the park's administration has begun visiting surrounding communities to discuss congestion management (Toh, 2015). In Montana, the Superintendent of Glacier National Park takes a leadership role in the Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent, an exemplary binational collaborative group that formed in 2006, centered on Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks. Although many NPS officials have shown a growing willingness to engage with gateway communities and regional stakeholders, there has heretofore been a notable lack of examples and best practices to guide administrators in conducting and maximizing the gains from such engagement. I argue that planning and management by the NPS needs to proactively seek novel ways to engage with gateway communities and other regional stakeholders. Administrators cannot work in silos, but rather must recognize that parks are innately connected to the broader regions in which they sit, and that their activities have important implications for stakeholders in the region, and that the activities of stakeholders in the region have key impacts on parks. Mere consultation with these stakeholders is often not enough. Instead, true collaboration is necessary to holistically tackle the transboundary issues facing these regions. Recognizing this need, I suggest that the ZRC, based in Southwestern Utah in the area surrounding Zion National Park, offers an opportunity to investigate a case study of collaborative Corbin 7 problem solving in such a region. Analyzing preliminary data collected from this case study, I suggest applications and best practices for other, similar regions. Corbin 8 The Current State of National Park Service Planning The National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 established the NPS as the caretaker federal agency for National Parks and Monuments, with a mission "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." The requirement to provide for the enjoyment of parks demands that the NPS provide access to the lands it manages, while the requirement to leave those lands unimpaired for future generations demands reasonable restrictions on access and development for conservation. Thus, the mission of the NPS is actually two-in-one, with that dual mission having at its core a tension between the need to conserve natural, historical, and cultural objects and the need to provide access to the same for public enjoyment. Planning, therefore, is a critically important endeavor for the administration of National Parks so as to properly strike a balance between conservation and recreation. The NPS's planning methodology is informed by frameworks based on the idea of carrying capacity. Carrying capacity, in this context, refers to the reality that as more people visit a park or protected area, the greater the deleterious impact they will have on the park's natural resources, social conditions, and the ability of the park's staff to appropriately manage the area (Manning, 2011, pp. 82-3). This understanding is an application of Hardin's famous Tragedy of the Commons, which surmises that individuals following their self-interest will degrade commonly held resources (like parks) to an unacceptable level if access is unrestricted. Corbin 9 The Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) and Visitor Experience and Resource Protection (VERP) frameworks are two widely used methods for applying carrying capacities to park management. Though the methods differ, these frameworks have at their core essentially the same logic, with key elements remaining the same. They call for a definition of the conditions that are to be maintained, standards with which to measure those conditions, a monitoring system for indicator variables to ascertain if conditions in the park meet the defined standards, and the use of management actions to achieve or maintain those standards (Manning, 2007, pp. 25-7). In 2016, the Interagency Visitor Use Management Council released a new framework to coordinate Visitor Use Management Planning across the different federal land management agencies, including the NPS. Within agency management circles, this updated visitor use management process has been referred to simply as "The Framework". The Framework outlines a four step process, once again underpinned by an understanding of carrying capacity (Interagency Visitor Use Management Council, 2017). (1) Build the Foundation (understand why the project or plan is needed - this includes a review of foundational documents and existing plans) (2) Define Visitor Use Management Direction (describe the end-goal in terms of desired conditions and determine how those conditions will be monitored) (3) Identify Management Strategies (identify strategies for managing use and develop a strategy for monitoring conditions) (4) Implement, Monitor, Evaluate, and Adjust (choose and implement strategies, conduct ongoing monitoring, and revisit strategies if necessary) One of the first formal applications of The Framework on NPS land is currently underway at the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, which, familiarly, is coping Corbin 10 with issues arising from increased visitation. The Delaware Water Gap protects a stretch of the Delaware River in Pennsylvania and New Jersey as it cuts through a ridge in the Appalachian Mountains. Less than a hundred miles from New York City, the Delaware Water Gap is a key recreational resource for millions of Americans. Park managers, with assistance from Clemson University, have thus far completed Phase 1 -- Build the Foundation. To develop baselines they conducted visitor surveys and used field cameras to count people and vehicles at particular locations, and determined measurable indicators for crowding and visitor conflicts. NPS staff has moved on to public scoping and has presented a variety of management alternatives to address crowding. Those alternatives range from developing additional recreational resources like boat launches, to limiting or restricting use like creating single-user trails (ex. Hiker-only trails), to changes in operations like implementing an entrance fee (Fefer, Hallo, Riungu, & Stone, 2016). These interventions, though, are limited to what can feasibly be done inside of or at the park's boundaries. Robert Manning and Laura Anderson, in their book Managing Outdoor Recreation: Case Studies in the National Parks¸ offer a concept map of strategies for managing outdoor recreation. They categorize specific strategies into four groups: increase supply, reduce impact of use, increase durability of the resource or experience, and limit use (Manning & Anderson, 2012). All of the strategies contemplated, though, focus on what can be undertaken unilaterally by park managers and their agencies. What is missing, then, is a recognition of the possibilities for managing recreational uses by leveraging partnerships or building coalitions with outside stakeholders, particularly those that can bring resources - land, money, staffing, voices - to bear on the issue. Take, for example, the strategies categorized under "increase supply". They break down into further into strategies that increase supply through temporal or spatial means. Corbin 11 Strategies highlighted in yellow have implications for gateway communities, and the strategy in red was added to the concept map as a way a park or recreation area could leverage regional partnerships as a discrete strategy for managing outdoor recreation. A full version of the adaptation of this concept map is available in the appendix. While there is recognition within the NPS of a need to build partnerships and acknowledge gateway communities, there is an ongoing need for more collaboration with those partners. Management has typically focused on actions inside park boundaries, and the current planning regime supports that focus. The focus on carrying capacity in visitor use management implies a need for further development or regulations to cope with the impacts of that visitation. However, as the profile and use of National Parks continues to increase, the issues related to tourism continue to expand in number, scope, and area, and they are not contained within park boundaries. Therefore, there is a need to explore collaborative regional planning as a serious strategy for expanding the solution-shed for park-related problems to include a breadth of regional partners. Corbin 12 Relevant Examples In broad terms, collaborative regional planning involves bringing together regional stakeholders to work together on issues or challenges of mutual concern. This could entail cooperation on projects and initiatives, dialogue and joint fact-finding, and discussion of individual projects and ideas. The successful operation of a regional collaborative depends on a shared understanding of the situation and the interests of various stakeholders, which requires ongoing dialogue that builds towards cooperative planning and strategizing. The needs of a successful collaboration, in turn, require a process for facilitating dialogue and productive meetings. A major theme of the literature on collaboration in natural resource settings focuses on the expected positive outcomes of collaborative planning. These outcomes are particularly important to consider when considering collaborative planning as an alternative to traditional participation methods. Judith Innes and David Booher are two of the leading theoreticians in advocating the benefits of collaborative planning in these settings. In their 2004 paper Reframing Public Participation: Strategies for the 21st Century they write: "Participation [in planning] must be collaborative and it should incorporate not only citizens, but also organized interests, profit-making and non-profit organizations, planners and public administrators in a common framework where all are interacting and influencing one another and all are acting independently in the world as well." (p. 422) Trust-building and the development of institutional capacity are key expected outcomes of collaboration that offer a compelling argument that collaboratives like the ZRC ought to be pursued. On trust, Gray, Shwom, and Jordan (2012) offer that "participation in decision-making Corbin 13 by those affected by the decision is thought to increase trust (672). Building institutional capacity at a societal level makes stakeholders and organizations more apt to cooperate on issues of mutual concern or interest. Building relationships among stakeholders also reduces the level of uncertainty related to individual plans or actions and their impacts on other stakeholders (Bryson, Quick, Slotterback, & Crosby, 2013). Innes and Booher surmise that when participants are empowered to listen and be heard they learn new ideas and gain an understanding of others' views, leading to the recognition that different views are legitimate. Collaboratives can also support the development of shared meaning through interaction and dialogue that leads to learning about others' interests, preferences, values, and worldviews (Bryson, Quick, Slotterback, & Crosby, 2013). The transformative power of dialogue in a collaborative setting, then, is itself a desirable outcome of collaboration, reducing the potential for conflict and building understanding and respect among participants. While the National Park Service emphasizes cooperative planning in its 2006 Management Policies, there are few good examples of how this should be done. Those Management Policies state: Section 2.3.1.8 Cooperative Planning "General management planning will be conducted as part of cooperative regional planning and ecosystem planning whenever possible. NPS participation in cooperative regional planning will be undertaken with the hope of better coordinating and focusing the independent efforts of multiple parties. NPS participation in such planning efforts will acknowledge the rights and interests of other landowners. While being consistent with NPS Corbin 14 Management Policies and park goals, plans will identify and consider potential effects outside and inside park boundaries, and plans will identify ways to enhance beneficial effects and mitigate adverse effects." (National Park Service, 2006) Overall, very few parks have engaged in authentic collaboration that captures the benefits detailed in the previous section. The Management Directives call for park managers to "identify and consider potential effects outside and inside park boundaries," emphasizing consultation over true collaboration. Four examples illustrate the evolution and state of collaborative planning within the National Park Service. Two specifically concern transportation, which has shown to be a common issue that stakeholders have been able to coalesce around and is a particularly acute problem in Zion. The example from Yosemite demonstrates an NPS approach to incorporating collaborative elements into the planning process required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The fourth is the previously mentioned Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent, which offers perhaps the best current, ongoing example of regional collaboration by a National Park in the United States. The examples from Cape Cod and Glacier come closest to paralleling the activities of the ZRC, and the examples from Grand Canyon and Yosemite show the evolution of collaboration by the NPS, culminating in the growing capacity and enthusiasm for collaborative processes like the ZRC. Grand Canyon National Park Transportation Planning Transportation is one of the most important tools available to park managers for addressing issues like congestion, crowding, and unendorsed parking. Alternative Corbin 15 Transportation Systems (ATS) are becoming more prevalent within the NPS as visitation grows. However, they often rely on utilizing parking outside of park boundaries to reduce internal vehicle congestion and parking demand. This action, though, requires cooperating with gateway communities or other land management agencies to secure land for parking. The 1995 General Management Plan for the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park is an illustrative example of this. As one of the most visited sites in the NPS, the 1995 plan recognized that "the South Rim is too crowded in the summer. The road system is heavily congested … Parking for automobiles and buses is inadequate. The shuttle system is crowded and there are too few buses" (Manning, Lawson, Newman, Hallo, & Monz, 2014, p. 145). Because of those issues, Grand Canyon administration created the South Rim Visitor Transportation Plan. This plan was produced by the National Park Service with consultation from the Kaibab National Forest. It relies on a parking area and shuttle stop near the gateway community of Tusayan, Arizona to bring visitors into the park. At the time of the plan, Tusayan was an unincorporated community in Coconino County (it has since incorporated as a municipality). While the plan mentions opportunities to partner with businesses in Tusayan, there is little evidence of community involvement in the formulation of this plan, and though there was consultation with the Forest Service, it did not reach the level of full collaboration to address issues of mutual concern, instead being wholly focused on improving transportation in the National Park (Grand Canyon National Park, 2008). This level of engagement with gateway communities is common, particularly so prior to the promulgation of the new visitor use management framework. Under this paradigm, gateway communities take a peripheral role in planning for visitor use or transportation management for Corbin 16 the Park Service. That said, other examples from around the Service show an increasing interest and gusto for more integrated regional collaboration. Yosemite Tuolumne River Plan Collaboration within the NEPA process has been on the rise in recent years, particularly in the alternatives development process. A major motivation for greater stakeholder inclusion, particularly in controversial projects, is to avoid lawsuits at a later stage of the process. A salient example of this kind of inclusion comes from Yosemite National Park, where the Tuolumne River Plan was developed in cooperation with stakeholders to address crowding in the Tuolumne Meadows area of the park (Yosemite National Park, 2014). Park staff used "planner for a day" workshops to find different preferences among the public for future management. The alternatives developed from these workshops reflected different sets of community preferences regarding the condition and level of access to the meadows. Alternative 1: Emphasizing a Self-Reliant Experience Alternative 2: Expanding Recreational Opportunities Alternative 3: Celebrating the Tuolumne Cultural Heritage Alternative 4: Improving the Traditional Tuolumne Experience The level of stakeholder involvement in the development of the Tuolumne River Plan was a key in its ability to avoid controversy and litigation. Through their participation in the process, potential litigants better understood the legal and regulatory constraints of NEPA, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the NPS planning process. Additionally, the use of joint fact-finding in alternatives development limited the problem of "dueling experts". The chosen alternative (Alternative 4) included a commitment to adaptive management that allowed the plan to address Corbin 17 the primary interests of most regional stakeholders. Those interests emerged as a result of consultation and participation during the Public Scoping phase of NEPA. Cape Cod Transit Task Force The Cape Cod National Seashore spans forty miles of seashore on Cape Cod, interwoven with six towns. In 2000, the Cape Cod Transit Task Force was established to address the need for improved transit on the Cape (Manning, Lawson, Newman, Hallo, & Monz, 2014). Leadership for the Task Force came from the local US House Representative, William Delahunt, the Cape Cod Commission, the regional planning organization for Barnstable County, and from the NPS. The Cape Cod Transit Summit was convened in February 2000 by those leaders with a purpose "to develop community consensus on the future of public transportation on the Cape." Attendees to the summit agreed that action was necessary to address the problem of seasonal traffic congestion and its impact on mobility for residents. So, the Cape Cod Transit Task Force was created to oversee the development of a five-year transportation plan. Members of the task force were appointed by the Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation, and they had five primary goals in formulating their plan. Those goals were: to reduce automobile dependency, to mitigate seasonal traffic, to meet the needs of the year-round population, to develop coordination, communication, and cooperation, and to incorporate smartgrowth and land-use planning into the transportation plan (Paul S. Sarbanes Transit in Parks Technical Assistance Center, 2012). To meet those goals, the Task Force undertook a number of activities. A subgroup within the task force worked with both private and public transportation providers to coordinate their schedules to reduce travel times for transit users. The subgroup also coordinated the widespread adoption of biodiesel among the different transit providers on the Corbin 18 Cape, addressing maintenance, distribution, and public education about biofuels. The Task Force also spearheaded the creation of a special bus to reflect the needs of residents and tourists. The Flex Bus makes designated stops throughout the Cape, but can also, by request, stop anywhere along the route for a waiting passenger who flags down the bus, and can travel up to three quarters of a mile from the designated route with an advance reservation. On top of those services, the Task Force published a visitor's guide for Cape Cod that encourages car-free trips by offering maps and timetables to facilitate transit use. Funding for the Cape Cod Transit Task Force comes from a mix of NGO, local, state, and federal sources. They employ what they a call a "ladder approach" to transportation projects. The Task Force's five-year transportation plan serves as the guiding document for projects. Each proposal must show a link to existing transportation options, reference future projects, and demonstrate how the project would help the region meet the objectives laid out in the transportation plan. Project planning then involves local community members who would be affected by the service or project. For instance, local high school students were included on the committee that planned the Flex Bus, and their suggestion for the bus to have seats facing one another to encourage social interaction was ultimately implemented. Meetings of the Task Force occur weekly, are open to the public, and feature local speakers who are invited to discuss projects, concerns, and other relevant happenings. The Cape Cod Transit Task Force highlights how effective regional collaboration can be a boon to addressing regional issues. In this case, the problem-shed and the solution-shed match up fairly well, and the geographical interconnectedness and history of collaboration was a major factor in the success of the National Seashore's collaborative efforts. In general, transportation offers low-hanging fruits, so it can be a useful starting place for larger, integrated collaborations. Corbin 19 In this case, the collaboration was largely project-focused, rather than relationship-focused. However, frequent cooperation on specific projects has the general effect of improving relationships across governments. Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent Glacier National Park has been a leader of the Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent, an annual forum that convenes stakeholders from the region centered around Glacier National Park in Montana and Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta (Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent, 2012). The need for regional collaboration in this area is particularly acute, because it features an ecosystem that stretches across Montana, Idaho, Alberta, and British Columbia, also encompassing several Native American or First Nations reservations and is also deeply threatened by climate change. The Superintendent of Glacier National Park is a member of the Roundtable's leadership team. A major planning activity of the Roundtable is its Adaptive Management Initiative, which supports projects related to climate change that assess current conditions and future vulnerabilities, inventory local strengths and weaknesses related to climate change, build a constituency to address its effects on the region, and take tangible action to build resiliency to climate change. The Roundtable puts out an annual request for proposals, large and small, that will help the region address climate change. The example of Glacier's participation in the Roundtable is important for other parks to consider, particularly the large, landscape-level parks. Climate change is expected to present serious regional challenges, felt particularly acutely in the kinds of subalpine, alpine, glacial, and Arctic landscapes that are common in the National Parks, which will have important management implications for parks. Greater wildfire risk, climate- Corbin 20 induced migration of species, and changing weather patterns all demand a regional approach to planning, doubly so in the context of the massive influx of visitors to the parks. Corbin 21 The Zion Regional Collaborative The Zion Regional Collaborative formed in 2016, bringing together key stakeholders from the region surrounding Zion National Park and the Virgin River in southwestern Utah. These stakeholders included the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Washington County, the towns of Springdale and Rockville, the Utah Office of Tourism, the Utah Department of Transportation, and the National Parks Conservation Association. The stated purpose of the Zion Regional Collaborative is, "to bring together stakeholders to proactively and collaboratively identify and take action to address current and emerging issues in the Zion region. To achieve this goal, the effort will facilitate information sharing and coordination among regional stakeholders, as well as joint development and implementation of regional strategies. The effort will aim to build consensus around courses of action and mobilize diverse resources to support implementation." The Collaborative coalesced as Zion National Park began the process of developing a new Visitor Use Management (VUM) plan in the fall of 2016. Prior to the start of the VUM process, the NPS held a collaboration clinic that brought together regional stakeholders to discuss threats and opportunities for the Zion area. Though there was little follow-up to this meeting, it helped to create momentum that was ultimately seized upon by the EDR and motivated stakeholders to launch the ZRC. In the VUM process, external stakeholders, along with the general public, were asked to provide thoughts on what they value, have experienced, and would prefer regarding future visitor use in the park at public listening sessions. Based on these initial public listening sessions the Corbin 22 NPS formulated a proposed action, which was then presented to interested stakeholders during public scoping. People were able to submit comments on the proposed action over the internet, by mail, or in person at public meetings. Meetings were held in Las Vegas, Hurricane, Springdale, Zion Lodge, Cedar City, Salt Lake City, and Kanab. During public scoping, the NPS received about 470 comments, with more than half coming from Utah residents. The park presented four questions for public comment (National Park Service, 2016): Question 1: The National Park Service is evaluating a reservation and/or timed-entry system during periods of high use to protect park resources and improve visitor experience in Zion Canyon. What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of this type of system? What ideas do you have on how these types of systems might be implemented? Question 2: Which of the other potential Zion canyon-wide strategies do you feel would be most helpful in meeting the plan purpose and need? Question 3: Which of the destination-specific potential management strategies do you feel would be most helpful in meeting the plan purpose and need and why? Question 4: Are there other management strategies we should consider as we develop alternatives for the plan? While this process offers good opportunities for public input, it lacks a collaborative element that could help parks like Zion address their issues by leveraging the resources and energy of key stakeholders. For example, there are opportunities to implement visitor management strategies outside of the park, such as inclusion of crowding information in tripplanning brochures distributed by tourism departments, and real-time conditions messaging by municipalities or departments of transportation, to attempt to impact visitor behavior before their Corbin 23 arrival in Zion. The sole focus on strategies implementable within NPS boundaries precludes exploring strategies like this through the VUM process. This process also does not offer a method for taking stock of concurrent plans and activities of nearby stakeholders that have the potential to impact the park's operations. For instance, road widening projects in the corridors entering a park have the potential to significantly impact the flow of vehicles arriving at park entrances and advertising campaigns at a state or national level can push the demand for visitor services higher. The ZRC was established to address the need for managers and administrators in the area to have a collaborative forum in which they can jointly pursue regional strategies for addressing key concerns. These stakeholders recognized a need to discuss the plans and strategies being implemented at the individual agency or municipal level and to discuss opportunities to coordinate that implementation. The first step in the formation of the regional collaborative was the completion of a situation assessment, which was conducted by the University of Utah's Environmental Dispute Resolution (EDR) Program. Dr. Danya Rumore of the EDR Program led an effort to assemble documents and interview thirty key regional stakeholders representing a diversity of interest groups and perspectives. The intent of the situation assessment was to gather and report on the diversity of perspectives and ideas about the region without attributing those ideas to any one stakeholder or organization. The interviewees commonly identified ten primary and interrelated issues: (1) Transportation (2) Community character and quality of life (3) Impacts on Zion National Park Corbin 24 (4) Impacts on the visitor experience (5) Workforce housing and commuting (6) Camping concerns (7) Public health and safety (8) Water (9) Natural hazard risks (10) Environmental impacts Among interviewees, there was broad agreement that the dramatic increases in visitation to Zion National Park and the related tourism was a main driver of the growing pressures on the region. Perhaps the most important finding from the situation assessment, which set the stage for the ZRC, was that the interviewees commonly saw potential for greater collaboration on regional solutions to the above issues. Thus, the team from the EDR Program was able to recommend that stakeholders in the region convene to initiate a regional collaborative effort, to leverage resources, coordinate planning activities, and prevent redundancy or conflict among individual efforts. The situation assessment was designed with the thought that there may be a need and desire for collaboration in the Zion region, and so a section of interview questions revolved around the potential and enthusiasm for such a process. Interviewees were asked for their perspective on opportunities and challenges for regional planning, whether such a process would be helpful, what they saw as potential areas of mutual gains and/or conflict in regional planning, who should be involved in a potential regional collaborative, who should convene the collaborative, and what resources already exist that may support the initiative. Those questions helped the EDR team determine whose support would be most critical for getting a breadth of Corbin 25 stakeholders to the table and identify possibilities for funding. These questions also planted a seed with stakeholders to consider how a collaborative may operate, and what issues it should address. By identifying conveners with the gravitas to get key players to the table, the EDR team and the motivated stakeholders were able to convene the first meeting of what would become the ZRC, which focused on the logistics and organization of the collaborative. The ZRC, as it currently exists, meets quarterly in a location close to Zion National Park. A Coordinating Council serves as the main coordinating group for the collaborative. Members of the Coordinating Council are required to hold high-level positions within their own organizations and must show a commitment to providing resources to the effort. Meetings of the ZRC's Coordinating Council are professionally facilitated, currently by the EDR Program. The facilitation team is responsible for organizing and facilitating meetings, as well as preparing meeting summaries. Technical subcommittees form to work on issues of interest between the meetings of the Coordinating Council. Membership in these subcommittees is open to including individuals or groups that are not included in the Coordinating Council. Subcommittees do not make decisions. Instead, they generate information, options, and ideas that are shared with and discussed by the Coordinating Council. So far, subcommittees have formed around transportation, community character, and camping and recreation. Interested organizations may sign on as Coordinating Council partners. These partner entities then identify a representative and alternate to consistently participate in the Coordinating Council. Others may take part informally as participants. Partners are to consider the collaborative's goals as they make individual decisions, and will alert others if they are pursuing a path that may affect the regional collaborative and its work. That said, each partner retains authority to make decisions as appropriate as an independent agency or entity. Corbin 26 The Zion Regional Collaborative strives for full consensus among partners in identifying regional strategies, guidelines, and approaches. If any entity or individual disagrees, they are responsible for productively explaining the reason for their disagreement. The group will then seek ways to address their concerns. In the event that a full consensus cannot be reached, decisions can be made via a super-majority, while keeping in mind that minority opinions may need to be considered before making final decisions. At this point, the ZRC has strong momentum going forward as a means of pursuing regional collaboration for transboundary problem-solving. As designed, key stakeholders have demonstrated commitment to attending and putting forth effort to drive the collaborative forward, and the formation of subcommittees took place as a result of consensus on the key and most pressing issues facing the region. Additionally, there is already anecdotal evidence that the meetings of the Coordinating Council serve as an important venue for relationship-building and bilateral discussions between different agencies or organizations. With a strong commitment that the ZRC should continue to meet and push for progress, there is reason for optimism that this effort can continue to seek solutions to self-identified issues and can evolve into an important case study that informs regional collaborative planning in similar regions. Corbin 27 Lessons Learned As the Zion Regional Collaborative is still in its infancy, the lessons that can be drawn from it at this time largely focus on the organizing and momentum-building aspects of what has been done thus far. Determining factors that have made the ZRC a success in its opening stages can yield useful lessons for park managers, facilitators, and other interested parties in similar regions. The ZRC, then, can serve as a useful example to point to for people interested in exploring the potential for regional collaborative groups in their own areas. As such, it is important to comment on the lessons learned and challenges from the ZRC so far. The key factor in the successful launch of the ZRC was the willingness of the participants to work together. The Zion region was ripe for collaboration. There was a widespread recognition and broad agreement about what the problems were, and the situation assessment was an important product that brought the levels of agreement into focus. There also existed a history of people in the region having good relationships with one another. Many locals call this "Zion Nice," and this notion reflects both a willingness to assume good intentions from others and a widely shared community value. The mayors of Springdale, Rockville, and Virgin have a history of meeting monthly along with the Superintendent of Zion to discuss local issues. As such, there was a strong appetite to work together among regional stakeholders to address the issues facing the region. Compared to other regions in Utah where the EDRP has also worked, the combination of agreement on the issues, a history of cooperation, and a willingness to cooperate more formally made Zion ready for the hard work establishing a cooperative. Another important spark that helped catalyze the formation of the ZRC was the collaboration clinic that had been held by the National Park Service in 2015. For this clinic, the staff from Zion National Park convened a wide breadth of key stakeholders to discuss and build Corbin 28 consensus around regional issues and explore opportunities for working together. However, a lack of capacity for effective follow-up on the collaboration clinic created an opening for the University of Utah to conduct its situation assessment and scope out opportunities for a facilitated collaborative. This was coupled with concern over the potential for restrictive action by Zion National Park as a result of its ongoing Visitor Use Management planning process. The EDRP was also in a unique situation, with staff having facilitated local meetings in the Town of Rockville prior to launching the situation assessment. Having strong support from the outgoing mayor of Rockville for the effort was useful in the initial stages of the situation assessment. A respected local official who could vouch for the project and staff was helpful for making contacts with stakeholders. While collaboration clinics have great potential to catalyze cooperative planning efforts like the ZRC, the NPS in other regions should partner with local universities or other organizations with resources to leverage clinics into ongoing collaborative regional planning. The establishment of the ZRC, however, was not without challenges. The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) emerged early on as an obstacle for the Park Service in participating in the Zion Regional Collaborative. This act creates rules surrounding Federal agencies' participation in committees created to serve an advisory function. Zion National Park's administration was initially concerned that the Zion Regional Collaborative may trigger FACA. The relevant language from that law reads, "The Congress finds that there are numerous committees, boards, commissions, councils, and similar groups which have been established to advise officers and agencies in the executive branch of the Federal Government and that they are frequently a useful and beneficial means of Corbin 29 furnishing expert advice, ideas, and diverse opinions to the Federal Government. The congress further finds and declares that .... new advisory committees should be established only when they are determined to be essential and their number should be kept to the minimum necessary .... [and] the function of advisory committees should be advisory only, and that all matters under their consideration should be determined, in accordance with law, by the official agency, or officer involved." Ultimately, it was determined that a provision in Section 4 of the law prevented the ZRC from triggering FACA. The relevant text reads thusly: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed to apply to any local civic group whose primary function is that of rendering a public service with respect to a Federal program, or any State or local committee, council, board, commission, or similar group established to advise or make recommendations to State or local officials or agencies." The need to avoid triggering FACA made the NPS wary of being listed as an official convener of the ZRC, although their support for the collaborative was key in getting the effort off the ground. While the NPS (as well as the BLM) have been able to participate in the ZRC, FACA potentially represents a challenge to other, similar collaboratives. Should a collaborative be determined to trigger FACA, an advisory committee charter would need to be filed with the agency head and the Congressional committees with legislative jurisdiction over the agency. Several rules governing designated Advisory Committees would also pose obstacles to the performance of a collaborative like the ZRC. For example, all documents like meeting minutes, Corbin 30 working papers, and studies would need to be available for public inspection and copying at a location in the office of the agency to which the committee reports. FACA also requires that a designated officer or employee of the Federal Government have the authority to adjourn any meeting of said committee, posing an obstacle for effective facilitation of such a group. Ensuring participant continuity was another key challenge for the early stages of the ZRC, and is expected to continue to be an ongoing challenge for the facilitation team. Because of financial or human resource limitations, some key stakeholders were unable to be present at each meeting, or sent different representatives to the meetings. Though these organizations were not a part of the core membership of the collaborative, the lack of participant continuity from some organizations represents a missed opportunity to make the most out of the time and energy invested by others at the collaborative. Insofar as relationship building and trust building are an important expected outcome of collaboration, the lack of continuity in participation is an important hurdle to overcome for facilitators and more committed members of the group. Defining the geographic scope of the collaborative was another challenge for the early steps of the ZRC. This, in particular, was a cause of conflict among participants. While there was an initial focus specifically on the western Zion canyon, as the process snowballed additional counties and organizations became interested in participating. Because these counties and organizations could bring resources and energy to the collaborative, they were invited to participate. Because participation in the collaborative, as stated in its charter, was open to interested individuals or groups, the geographic scope of the ZRC was effectively self-defined, with some reminding of this fact from the facilitation group when conflict over the scope arose. Funding is a challenge for many collaborative efforts, and the ZRC is no exception. The EDR program was able to bring together a combination of research grants and local funding to Corbin 31 be able to initiate the ZRC. EDR staff gained a commitment from the Washington County Convention and Tourism Office to provide funding for the ZRC. The mission of the Office is threefold: - Promote Washington County as a premier convention and tourist destination. - Stimulate tourism's economic impact. - Unify tourism partners to maximize the visitor's experience. Their support for the ZRC fits well with the third component of the mission statement, particularly in light of the reality that to crowding was widely recognized to be harming the visitor experience to Zion. That Office believed that, given the level of marketing occurring that promotes the Zion region from the state and national level, a better use of their funding was to support a project like the ZRC that could address the impacts of tourism and unite stakeholders with an interest in problem-solving. From a research perspective, conducting surveys of participants was another difficulty encountered by the facilitation team. As a program based out of the University of Utah, the Environmental Dispute Resolution Program was able to secure a grant to financially support the ZRC contingent on a research component. To satisfy the research requirement, EDRP staff disbursed online surveys following each meeting. Problematically, these surveys received few responses compared to the number of participants, and they were often answered weeks after the meeting, muddying their usefulness as data points. This challenge could perhaps be overcome by distributing surveys during meetings, but that would also be a poor use of participants' time during the quarterly meetings. Another option worth exploration would be to distribute physical copies of the survey at the conclusion of the meeting along with a postage paid envelope. This issue was somewhat unique to the ZRC as compared to other potential collaboratives, but Corbin 32 because University partners can make good facilitators or participants, research grants represent a potentially fruitful source of funding for these kinds of projects. Given the well-documented issues facing many National Parks, the ongoing work of the Zion Regional Collaborative should be of interest to many regions around the country. The ZRC is an interesting example of how an effective facilitator can catalyze stakeholders to selforganize and self-define the activities of a collaborative. As recognition of the need for National Parks to leverage partnerships and collaborate grows, examples like the Zion Regional Collaborative, the Roundtable on the Crown of the Continent, and the Cape Cod Transit Task Force will become more important. Understanding the differences in scope, facilitation, and mission of these efforts will help future managers determine their own needs and opportunities. As more such collaboratives get started, there will hopefully be less and less "reinventing the wheel" with each subsequent effort. The diagram above is one attempt to classify different landscape-scale collaboratives according to their traits. As more officials within the Park Service come to understand the benefits of collaboration, there is a great hope that they will approach such opportunities with the gusto that the administration Corbin 33 of Zion has. There is reason for optimism that effective collaboration can serve as an important tool in the administrator's toolbox. Corbin 34 Conclusions As the Zion Regional Collaborative proceeds, the opportunities for effective problemsolving and research will continue to grow. While the bulk of this paper has thus far focused on the beginning phases of the ZRC and the expected outcomes of collaboration, it is now time to turn attention towards the future of the collaborative. Next Steps for the Zion Regional Collaborative With the ZRC now well underway, it will be important moving forward to build on the effort's momentum. Since the subcommittees are now established, the Coordinating Council can move its attention to the issues that catalyzed the formation of the collaborative. Meetings of the Council will begin to include updates on the activities of the subcommittees and decisions regarding their activities. Thus, future reports on the ZRC should be able to include some of the specific outcomes of this collaborative. Once the ZRC begins to suggest specific actions for the region, the activities of the group should be publicized. This could be through press releases, discussion with journalists, and academic articles on the group. Publicizing the ZRC can draw attention to the benefits of a collaborative of this nature, and potentially spur opportunities for similar projects in other regions. Highlighting how this group tackled obstacles like the concerns surrounding FACA could help other administrations overcome some of the reticence they may have about undertaking such an effort. Additionally, publicizing this work may open up opportunities for the EDRP to engage with other communities. As the subcommittees continue to work, there will also be opportunities for researchers with specific interest to engage with the ZRC. For instance, transportation researchers may be Corbin 35 interested in learning and reporting on ideas and actions related to addressing the specific transportation-related actions in the Zion region. At the same time, other scientists may be interested in presenting their research to the Coordinating Council if it is relevant for the Zion region. Climate scientists, for example, could be brought in to discuss climate change and its specific impacts on Zion and Virgin River. Finally, the ongoing opportunities for students to participate in facilitating and studying a regional collaborative such as the ZRC represents a unique asset for the University of Utah that can help to improve the recognition and reputation of the University, the Environmental Dispute Resolution Program, and the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning. Opportunities for Further Research The literature on collaboration in natural resource settings emphasizes many of the expected positive outcomes of collaborative processes. Increased levels of trust and respect among stakeholders, increased capability to absorb and utilize complex information, and reducing uncertainty are all expected based on the existing literature. What are few and far between are actual case studies demonstrating these outcomes. Beginning to fill this gap is expected to be one of the main contributions of the academic research accompanying the Zion Region Collaborative. A major complicating factor in comparing studies of the social outcomes of collaboratives revolved around the lack of consistent performance measures in the body of literature. For instance, Innes and Booher extolled the benefits of collaboratives in developing institutional capacity, but do not offer a way to test this hypothesis in a real-world setting. Such a means of measuring the development of institutional capacity would be very useful for Corbin 36 supporting the academic research that is a part of the Zion Region Collaborative. Most of the studies reviewed here measured trust qualitatively through interviews or surveys, and focused on bilateral relationships between individuals and governments, or between stakeholders and land management agencies. To measure institutional capacity, though, would require either extensive interviewing focusing on stakeholder's perceptions of their agency as well as their relationships with other regional stakeholders, or more extensive surveying to analyze social networks. So, an important contribution to this field would be to establish a replicable way of measuring the impacts of collaborative engagement on institutional capacity in order to compare practices to results. Another opportunity for further research exists in assessing the scale of change arising from participation in a collaborative. Building off of the need to measure changes in institutional capacity, future research should also assess change at the individual and the organizational level. At the individual level, research could focus on how a stakeholder's attitudes and actions changed as a result of participation in a collaborative, with a focus on any particular activities or dialogues that sparked epiphanies. At the organizational level, further research on how organizations with legal or political constraints are able to collaborate and how the individual participant representing an organization in a collaborative turns individual change into organizational change would be useful. Koontz and Thomas (2006) point to another major gap in the existing literature, recognizing a need for greater study of the environmental outcomes of landscape-based collaboratives. That is to say, there needs to be greater research into the question of whether collaboratives actually result in improvements to the local environment compared to regions without collaborative planning. Similarly, where collaboratives also have an economic element, Corbin 37 the question of whether collaborative planning improves local economic indicators represents another area for future research. Ditto for sustainability, resiliency, and adaptiveness, complicated even further by nebulous and only sometimes overlapping definitions in the literature for these three terms. These questions, though, may need to come in the wake of more case studies, like that in the Zion Region Collaborative, in order to have a large enough set of cases to draw conclusions from. Simply put, there are not yet enough data points out there concerning collaborative landscape-scale planning to draw quality conclusions on their impacts on environmental quality, economic health, sustainability, resiliency, or adaptiveness. Concluding Thoughts As growing visitation to National Parks strains park staff and resources, the ability of the National Park Service to continue to achieve its dual mission will depend more and more on utilizing a full quiver of management tools. The administration at Zion National Park has shown a willingness to explore collaboration with regional stakeholders as a way of leveraging resources and energy, recognizing that the regional scope of the issues affecting Zion demands regional solutions. As such, the Zion Region Collaborative presents an opportunity for case study research with nationwide implications. The theoretical benefits of collaboration are well documented, and there is great potential collaboration to become an increasingly important tool for park managers. Corbin 38 Works Cited Bryson, J., Quick, K., Slotterback, C., & Crosby, B. (2013). Designing Public Participation Processes. Public Administration Review, 73(1). Chase, L., Decker, D., & Lauber, T. (n.d.). Public Participation in Wildlife Management: What Do Stakeholders Want? Insights and Applications Public Participation in Wildlife Management: What Do Stakeholders Want? Consensus Building Institute. (n.d.). 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