Landing the Plane

Remarks at the National Leadership Team Meeting Portland, OR (Bruce I. Knight, Chief, Natural Resources Conservation Service)

Portland, Oregon
April 4, 2006

It’s hard to believe we’re mid-way through Fiscal Year 2006. It’s time to reconnoiter and see where we stand. And that’s what this NLT is all about.

When you all came to Washington in January, we talked about 2006 being the year of consolidating the gains—fine-tuning our business tools and fully realizing
the progress we have made. The focus for 2006 is efficiency, effectiveness and transparency—all with a view toward meeting our customers’ needs.

I want to take that just a step further. To fully consolidate our gains, we need to complete the work we’ve begun.

At a conference I attended recently, I heard a speaker put it this way: “You gotta land the plane.” It’s not enough to complete a flawless take-off and follow the flight plan to your destination. You gotta land the plane.

This year—2006—is a season of follow-up and follow-through. This is the year we’re gonna land the plane.

We’re gonna wrap up old business. We’re gonna complete the contracts we’ve signed. We’re gonna get conservation on the ground.

Contracts signed, promises made, promises given, promises kept—they’re all important. But what everyone wants to know is what’s actually happened on the landscape.

This is the year we have to deliver on those commitments. We’ve gotta land the plane.

What we do this year will pave the way for what lies ahead—the farm bill of 2007.
We want to complete the work under the 2002 farm bill to get ready for even greater challenges to come. The secret is that as an agency we need to provide we have the capacity to handle more dollars in the next farm bill.

Personnel Changes

First, let’s talk about personnel changes. Last time we had quite a number of them.
There are fewer this time, and I hope I haven’t missed any.

Retirements

We have only one retirement: National Forester Doug Williams.

At headquarters:

We have a number of changes at headquarters.

Jack Carlson is Chief Information Officer.

Robin Heard is director of the Easement Programs Division. (She started yesterday, after having served as acting CFO.)

Linda Varner Mount is director of the Civil Rights Division.

Edith Morigeau is National Tribal Relations Coordinator in the RC&D and Rural Lands Division.

Priscilla Perry is office assistant for the Deputy Chief for Programs.

Jerome Reece has joined the Resource Economics and Social Sciences Division.

Leah Ricke is a soil conservationst in the Stewardship Programs Branch of the Financial Assistance Programs Division.

John Vrana is the new Programs Business Tools team leader.

Diane Guidry is State and Field Communications branch chief in the legislative and Public Affairs Division.
Acting:

Special thanks to all those who have been currently serving in an acting capacity:

Allen Green is acting Deputy Chief for Strategic Planning and Accountability until mid-May.

Greg Johnson is acting director of the Human Resources Management Division.

Garry Lee served as acting State Conservationist in New York.

Kevin Brown is the acting CFO, in addition to his normal activities.

Ed Biggers is acting State Conservationist in Colorado, and Bart Huber is acting in Ed’s place as director of the Management Services Division.

Rosendo Trevino and his team are working on international issues.

In the states:

We also have several new State Conservationists:

Dennis Alexander in New Mexico.

Ron Alvarado in New York.

And just named—now—Craig Derrickson is headed to Pennsylvania. After having stewarded CSP for the past three years, it is time to give him the chance to be a State Conservationist.

Please welcome Dennis, Ron and Craig to your ranks.

FY 2002 to 2005 Accomplishments

As we think about finishing up the work we’ve begun—landing the plane—I am encouraged by how far we’ve come already. When we gathered in Washington in January, we talked about our accomplishments in Fiscal Year 2005.

Today, I want to look in a little greater depth at the work we’ve done over the past four years under the 2002 farm bill. We have a long list of accomplishments. Just to mention a few things that we shared last week with our appropriators, we’ve:

• Applied conservation on 50 million+ acres of working farm and ranchland.

• Developed and applied nearly 10,500 comprehensive nutrient management plans.

• Conducted a comprehensive study of technical assistance, reaffirming the intrinsic value of scientifically-based tools and activities including developing conservation plans and encouraging a knowledge-based approach to conservation.

• Established, then expanded nationwide, the Conservation Security Program to recognize outstanding land stewards and enable them to do more. And we just finished our third successful signup!

• Launched the Web Soil Survey to make soils data available 24/7 over the Internet (78 million hits, averaging 660,000 per day since Aug. 16, 2005 with a total of 260,620 unique visits over the past 6 months).

• Worked with more than 2,500 Technical Service Providers, obligating $52.7 million in FY 2005, providing the equivalent of 520 staff years to attain additional conservation achievements, while districts, partners and NRCS have grown and become more vital.

FY 2002 to 2005 Management Improvements

We’ve also made significant improvements in management—thanks to your hard work and creative ideas. We’re more efficient and effective. That means we can better serve our customers. These improvements include:

• Streamlining the payment processes for EQIP.

• Reducing required paperwork for customers through common computer database in USDA Service Centers.

• Establishing a single centralized web authentication service.
• Implementing Geographic Information Systems and Global Positioning Systems.

• Developing software to provide natural resource information, make map development easier and track conservation contracts.

• Beginning work on an automated application ranking tool.

• Establishing a process for rapid watershed assessment to provide initial estimates of where conservation investments can best address resource concerns.

• Creating a transparent allocations process using resource base and resource concern factors to allocate funds to states.

• Instituting programmatic reforms such as a pilot sign-up process for technical assistance and common easement and cost-share provisions where possible.

Budget

I want to turn to the budget for a few minutes. About three-quarters of you are dealing with declining budgets. And a handful have a deficit we need to work through to reduce. We’re working on that—together.

These situations are not anyone’s fault—they’re the result of a declining budget from last year. Funding for Fiscal Year 2006 (to date) is nearly $154 million less than in 2005. Even without EWP, the difference is more than $76 million.

Whether you’re dealing with a workout situation or just a tight budget, you’re not alone. The good news is that there are some brilliant ideas coming forward about ways to increase efficiency that will help us deal with the shortfall. We’ll have several opportunities here in Portland to share those ideas. And I hope you’ll be frank and speak openly about the difficulties you’ve faced and the solutions you’ve found.

We’re doing that at headquarters—sitting down as a team and brainstorming options that will make us more efficient. We’re looking for ideas from every level, and we know that the best ideas usually come from the field.

I want to be clear. This is not about fewer people. It’s about working smarter.
Let me just mention the efforts we’ve got going.

Tom Christensen and Bill Puckett have pulled together a team focusing on efficiency and effectiveness at headquarters. In addition, Kathy Gugulis is about to launch our second streamlining team. Our 2003 effort resulted in 1,363 suggestions—mostly from the field—leading to 24 recommendations—most of which we implemented. Again, the goal will be to save money, increase efficiency and reduce irritations and annoyances—like too many passwords to get into your computer.

You’ll also be hearing more about ABC—Activity-based Costing—it’s a tool to help us with workload analysis. Our current system helps us determine the cost of programs at the national level. This second generation system is going to give us data at the state level to help you as state conservationists do state workload analysis and modeling runs.

Further, July 17-21we’ll hold a National Efficiency Workshop in St. Louis. It’s another opportunity to focus on working smarter.

The bottom line is even though we have less money to work with, if we increase efficiency, we can still accomplish the same results. Now we just have to join forces to find those efficiencies.

Market-Based Approaches

At our last meeting, we talked at length about market-based approaches to conservation. We've been exploring opportunities for NRCS to become more involved in this new arena where private sector funds can be leveraged to accomplish more conservation than with Federal funds alone.

I also encourage you to explore this issue further on a website called “ecosystemmarketplace.com." Just as I encourage you to read a book titled "The New Economy of Nature" that chronicles the efforts of the Katoomba Group and others to begin putting a financial value on environmental goods and services.
Under Secretary Markey Rey will be meeting with the Katoomba Group in June.

In addition, you may recall receiving a bulletin asking you to send in a market-based success story from your state. Market-based approaches are not new, just a new term for us. But they offer great opportunities for increasing funding to help us reach our agency goals.

What we need to do now is build our capacity to identify and develop market-based approaches. Part of that is assessing where we are today and where we need to be tomorrow. Because market-based approaches have the potential to become major tools to help NRCS meet our conservation mission, I have established a team headed by Carl Lucero and charged them with developing a market-based incentives strategy. Those market-based success stories you submitted will help the team develop this strategy.

First of all, the team wanted to see what is actually occurring across the landscape and build those successful features into this new strategy. And second, the responses will help them determine the level of understanding of market-based approaches and how we can increase our proficiency in this area.

We want to ensure NRCS continues as the premier conservation agency and has the necessary tools to be on the cutting edge of technology and innovation. Market-based approaches are viable tools that we need to include in our portfolio to keep us out in front.

Human Capital Strategic Plan

On Thursday, you’re going to hear from Kevin Brown details about where we stand on developing our Human Capital Strategic Plan. But I want to mention a few points as we begin today.

In January, during the breakout sessions, you helped brainstorm ideas and solutions, based on the employee survey from December. Using your input, and drawing from the new Strategic Plan, the Core Team established a vision—and I really like it: Conservation First, People Always.

They’ve also outlined guiding principles focusing on service, partnerships and technical excellence—all in an environment that

• Welcomes diversity
• Expects excellence
• Encourages innovation and continual learning and
• Rewards creativity and results achieved.

Within that framework, they’ve developed goals, and strategies for achieving them. The goals focus on five key areas:

• Recruitment and retention
• Leadership
• Performance culture
• Talent development and knowledge management, and
• Human capital effectiveness

The Core Team has been meeting monthly and is making great progress. I know we’re all looking forward to hearing the details on their work.

NRCS Strategic Plan

Last time, we talked at length about the new NRCS Strategic Plan. Now it’s time to begin sharing that plan—with our employees and our partners.

Doug McKalip and others will be talking with you later about our full rollout.
And we’ll be sending out enough copies of the plan for every NRCS office to have one. Later this spring, we’ll have other materials available, including brochures with the highlights of the plan.

Again, I want to thank Kathy Gugulis, Dick Coombe and their team for the thorough analysis, great vision and plain hard work this plan represents. I’m convinced it’s a sound blueprint for the agency to follow for the next 10 or 15 years.

We’ve all contributed to this process, and we should all be proud of the plan.
But in order to put it into practice, we need to be sure every employee and every partner understands the plan and what it means to them in terms of what they do every day. That’s a big task for all of us in leadership, and it’s time to get started.

Conclusion

I said at the beginning that this NLT is about taking inventory of our progress at the mid-point of FY 2006 and finding ways to be more efficient. Think about this.
Someone once said, “People judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold, but so has a hard-boiled egg.”

That’s true of NRCS. We do have a heart of gold. Our heart is our people—and we really care about conservation, about making a positive difference on the landscape.

But we won’t be judged by what we want to happen. Rather we will be judged by what we make happen.

It’s simple, really. You gotta land the plane.