MID-ATLANTIC REGIONAL OCEAN PLANNING MID-ATLANTIC REGIONAL PLANNING BODY MEETING HELD AT CHARLES COMMONS 10 E. 33RD STREET BALTIMORE, MARYLAND ON WEDNESDAY, MAY 21, 2014 FROM HUNT REPORTING COMPANY Court Reporting and Litigation Support Serving Maryland, Washington, and Virginia 410-766-HUNT (4868) 1-800-950-DEPO (3376) 10:25 A.M. TO 5:30 P.M. P R O C E E D I N G S MS. CANTRAL: All right. We’re glad. It’s good to see you all back. Good morning, members of the public. Thank you for joining us for day two of this meeting. Before I review the agenda and get us going with our proceedings, we would like to welcome Megan Massawau (phonetic) with the Department of Energy who’s able to join us today, wasn’t here yesterday. So welcome, Megan. Good morning. Is there any other housekeeping things that we need to say before I just do a quick agenda review and get started? (Whereupon, there was no response.) HUNT REPORTING COMPANY Court Reporting and Litigation Support Serving Maryland, Washington, and Virginia 410-766-HUNT (4868) 1-800-950-DEPO (3376) MS. CANTRAL: No? All right. Well, just as a refresher, yesterday’s highlights included approving the framework for regional ocean planning that lays out goals and objectives, principles to adhere to, and a vision for regional ocean planning in the Mid-Atlantic. And we also had some very good discussion around several sector specific activities that are underway in this region related to ocean planning -- I mean, to ocean energy and also to habitat related activities. And we learned about those and recognize that there is a lot of relevance to those activities that are underway by individual institutions and how that can inform the planning effort and provide opportunities for coordination and better learning among the members that are represented here at the table. HUNT REPORTING COMPANY Court Reporting and Litigation Support Serving Maryland, Washington, and Virginia 410-766-HUNT (4868) 1-800-950-DEPO (3376) And we will do some more of that kind of discussion, that kind of substantive discussion, and what that suggests for the work of this RPB later this afternoon when we have some presentations about navigation related activities in the Mid-Atlantic. But before we do that, we are going to be devoting the majority of today to talking about now what? Now that the framework has been approved, the RPB is moving into the next phase of its work and that includes developing a work plan that leads into the creation of a -- what this group has decided to refer to as a regional ocean action plan and then further from that, the implementation of that action plan. So we want to talk about how do we get there from here, what is the time line associated with doing that, and how should the RPB organize itself around different components that it sees going into not only that work plan but other important fundamental parts HUNT REPORTING COMPANY Court Reporting and Litigation Support Serving Maryland, Washington, and Virginia 410-766-HUNT (4868) 1-800-950-DEPO (3376) of the process that will transcend the work plan. So there aren’t clear lines between stages and components of the work, but we do need to talk about what each of those components are and how we go about accomplishing them. Some of the work that we will be talking about today is already underway, things related to the development of the MARCO data portal that is a key tool that supports this planning work, the regional ocean assessment which we’ve had some dialogue about already, but we’ll talk about in more detail today. And then other aspects of the work so far has come to a conclusion, for example, the work that the -- a work group around the framework drafting has not concluded, and so we will be talking about what are next steps and how do we reconstitute some working groups and organize around getting things done. So the co-leads have put some thought into HUNT REPORTING COMPANY Court Reporting and Litigation Support Serving Maryland, Washington, and Virginia 410-766-HUNT (4868) 1-800-950-DEPO (3376) this and are making a number of process suggestions for how to do all of that and they’re going to walk you all through their recommendations and get some discussion and hear thoughts from the full membership about how to proceed. Is that all clear? So we’re going to spend the morning doing that. We’re scheduled to break at 12:30. We’ll come back and finish up with discussion of the work plan and the process going forward, timing, et cetera, and then we’ll turn to the navigation activities presentation. And we are scheduled to have a public comment session this afternoon. I believe it’s at 3:30, correct? Right, right. It’s at 3:30. And we’ll, you know, we’ll see how the timing goes. We adjusted a little bit to account for the realities of how -- of our pace yesterday and we’ll do the same today. But right now we’re scheduled for a public HUNT REPORTING COMPANY Court Reporting and Litigation Support Serving Maryland, Washington, and Virginia 410-766-HUNT (4868) 1-800-950-DEPO (3376) comment session at 3:30. Is that all clear? It all makes sense? Folks hearing me okay? I’m going to ask you that. You’re going to get so tired of it, but I’m traumatized by yesterday. All right. So with that, I think I’ll turn it over to Gwynne. MS. SHULTZ: Okay. And, again, start waving in the back if you can’t hear me and I’ll work to raise my voice. I’m going to be spending the next few minutes walking through three slides. And the first slide, what I’m going to do is spend some time talking about the recommendations, on the bigger process, and terminology. So this first slide yesterday when Kelsey introduced it, and I’m going to just briefly revisit it so we’re all on the same page with regard to that, HUNT REPORTING COMPANY Court Reporting and Litigation Support Serving Maryland, Washington, and Virginia 410-766-HUNT (4868) 1-800-950-DEPO (3376) you know, big process and the big terminology. My next slide is going to dig deeper into the time line, so it’s going to be the same process, same terminology, but we’ll be spending some time getting an overview of what we propose as being certain deadlines for different activities. And then on the next slide, what I’ll do is spend time talking about the work plan, what we think, you know, could go into the work plan, as well as the work, the process to get that accomplished. So we have the creation of a work group to help put together that work plan. So those are the three things that I’m going to go over on the next three slides. So going to that first slide -- so I’m going to go to the first slide and this is just a revisiting briefly what we went over yesterday. On the far left, you’ll see the first part of that arrow says the HUNT REPORTING COMPANY Court Reporting and Litigation Support Serving Maryland, Washington, and Virginia 410-766-HUNT (4868) 1-800-950-DEPO (3376) framework. This is the document that the RPB approved yesterday and it describes the RPB goals and our objectives and describes the initial geographic focus. The next thing as you move right on that image -- no, stay on this slide -- the next thing you see as we move on this image is the curve up on top which is the work plan. Now, what we’re planning to do is start development of this work plan next month and it will contain the actions, time lines, and capacities needed to develop a regional ocean action plan. It’s also going to include actions that are going to be -- that are informed by the goals and objectives that we approved in the framework and then also identifying time lines. So -- and I’m going to get into a lot more detail on that work plan, but what is it that it’s going to take to do the regional ocean plan, what is HUNT REPORTING COMPANY Court Reporting and Litigation Support Serving Maryland, Washington, and Virginia 410-766-HUNT (4868) 1-800-950-DEPO (3376) it going to take to develop some of the other products such as the regional ocean assessment, as well as all the time line that it’s going to take to do that. And everything within -- all of the actions in the work plan will support the goals and objectives that we identified. This work plan will be -- we’re calling it a living document and the reason being is we see this really as our regional planning body work plan that’s going to get us from here to the regional ocean action plan and beyond. So it’s going to continually be adapted as we learn more. The development of the regional ocean action plan and the work plan is not going to be sequential. It’s going to be happening as an ongoing basis, both of them complementing each other. Then that middle box, it does talk about the creation of a regional ocean action plan. The actual nature and purpose of that document is to be HUNT REPORTING COMPANY Court Reporting and Litigation Support Serving Maryland, Washington, and Virginia 410-766-HUNT (4868) 1-800-950-DEPO (3376) determined.