Natural Resource Damage Assessment: Methods and Cases

staff of agencies that are just beginning to exercise their authority to pursue NRDs as natural
resource trustees for their states. This chapter reports on the results of an effort made by the
authors of this report to gather such information about state-level NRD programs.
II. Method for gathering information
Two questionnaires were designed to gather factual information about state NRD
programs. The first was a one-page form which asked for information about the basic parameters
of the agency’s program (e.g. staffing and funding levels) and any assessment methods the state
trustees might have developed for their own use in conducting NRDAs. The second form was a
case-information form, constructed to gather information about cases that agencies had assessed
and/or settled in the years following major revisions to the federal regulations pertaining to NRD
assessment and recovery. Each agency was asked to fill out one such form for each NRD case it
had been handling since 1995. Copies of the questionnaires and the instruction sheet sent to the
agencies are found in the Appendix.
In order to choose where to mail these requests for information, a list was developed of
up-to-date contact names and addresses at all state trustee agencies in the country. This effort
began with lists from earlier studies (e.g. ASTWMO (1996) has a list of contacts) and from staff
at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR). People on the preliminary list were
contacted either to confirm that they were appropriate contacts or to suggest other names that
would be more suitable. During this process, some states were identified as having no program
relevant to the survey, and were dropped from the mailing list.
When the list was complete, a packet was sent to each of the 64 agencies on the list. Each
packet contained a cover letter, the instructions, one general survey form, and either 10 or 20
NRD case-information forms (depending on how large we expected their programs to be). The
initial mailing was made in August 2001. One round of follow-up telephone calls and emails was
made a month after the initial mailing; other reminders were made throughout the following
months.
As shown in Table 1.1, 20 of the 64 offices contacted responded with information a bout
their NRD programs and 14 responded to inform us that they had no NRD program; several of
the agencies with no current program did state that they are preparing to start engaging in NRD
activity. The remaining offices did not submit completed questionnaires (though only two
agencies sent official refusal to provide information). Many of the agencies that did not respond
to our request for information are quite likely not to have had NRD programs at the time of our
survey. However, offices in California and Texas, which have thriving NRD programs, were not
able to respond to our request for information. To the extent that we can not include information
about these programs in our report, any picture we draw of state-level NRD activity is
necessarily incomplete. It is also true that many of the responses were incomplete; we report here
as much information as was provided to us.
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