SHPOs: Wimping Out Doesn’t Help

I imagine it’s expectable, in these stressful times, but it seems to me that every time I’ve turned around lately, I’ve found another State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPOs) wimping out and letting an agency run roughshod over the Section 106 process and the (presumed) historic and cultural interests of his or her state’s citizenry. Recurrent issues include (but certainly aren’t limited to):

• Consulting firms contacting SHPOs and making/seeking (on the assumption that the SHPO awards such things) determinations of “no historic properties affected” or “no adverse effect,” sometimes based on the promised implementation of conditions, with no evidence that the responsible federal agency even knows what’s being determined and promised. This truly reduces the 106 process to a paperwork exercise, since there’s no reason to think that the consulting firm’s statements mean anything once the firm has collected its money and gone.
• Agencies (or consulting firms) initiating 106 review by filing determinations of eligibility or effect (or petitioning the SHPO to award them with such determinations) without any prior consultation at all – thus eliminating the guts of the process.
• Determinations of effect that address only historic buildings when the project under “review” clearly has the potential for effect on archaeological sites, landscapes, and other kinds of properties that don’t happen to have four walls and a roof, with no evidence that anybody has considered these other kinds of properties.
• “Consultation” only with the SHPO, with no effort whatever to identify and engage other consulting parties.
• Unrationalized areas of potential effect (APE) – sometimes nonsensically big, sometimes absurdly small – that have nothing to do with the actual likely effects of the project.
• Evaluations of individual buildings that are in fact parts of complexes, without any attention to the overall context of which the building is a part. I’ve lately seen one whole federal installation that’s literally been picked to pieces, with each piece – judged solely on its own out-of-context merits – judged insignificant, even though the whole installation was almost certainly eligible for the Register.

SHPOs, I realize that you’re under pressure; your staffs are being eviscerated, you get no help from NPS or the Advisory Council, your governor and legislature are on your backs, but for heaven’s sake, if you're going to accept any old piece of paper that anybody throws at you as evidence of compliance with Section 106, you're rendering the whole business -- and a large part of your existence -- meaningless.  And you're not helping anyone.  You’re not helping the agencies, or the taxpayers who pay for them, by nodding and winking at their violations of law and regulation; you’re undercutting the efforts of anyone in an agency who’s trying to promote effective compliance, and you’re setting the agencies up for successful litigation. You’re certainly not helping your states’ historic resources, or the citizens who care about them. Going along with BS “compliance” doesn’t help resolve the problems you’re facing; if anything it makes them worse. You’re helping make the Section 106 process worthless, and in the long (or maybe short) run that won’t help you or anybody else. If you can’t or won’t do your jobs, why don’t you just stop pretending to?

A Quiz for Cultural Resource Management Students

I understand that this blog is being used in some university CRM classes, so here's a little educational application.

The following quote is from a U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management environmental impact statement:

A Traditional Cultural Property (TCP) is an area of traditional importance that has been determined eligible for listing or has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places based on established definitions and criteria.


Relative to published U.S. government definitions, the above text is factually incorrect in at least two related ways.

Can you identify how it is erroneous?

For extra credit:

1. What are the public policy implications of these errors?
2. Why do you suppose BLM has perpetrated them?

106: The Loneliest Number

In reviewing agency (and other) proposals for the treatment of historic properties in response to the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), I’m astonished (or would be if I hadn’t become jaded by it all) at the agencies’ inability – shared, it seems, with State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs), the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), historic preservation consultants, and even litigants seeking to protect historic places – to count beyond 106.

Agencies seem quite routinely to decide that they will demolish, relocate, or otherwise muck about with historic properties (whether known to be historic or not) without considering the following rather explicit provisions of law:

Prior to acquiring, constructing, or leasing buildings for purposes of carrying out agency responsibilities, each Federal agency shall use, to the maximum extent feasible, historic properties available to the agency… (NHPA Section 110(a)(1) [16 U.S.C. 470h-2(a)]

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any Federal agency …..shall, to the extent practicable, establish and implement alternatives for historic properties, including adaptive use, that are not needed for current or projected agency purposes… (NHPA Section 111, [16 U.S.C. 470h-3(a)]

In simple language, with these two sections of law Congress directed federal agencies to (1) use historic buildings to house agency operations before deciding to go build new ones, and (2) figure out creative things to do with historic properties of all kinds under their control when they become surplus to their needs. But agencies quite routinely don’t do either thing, and nobody seems to do anything about it. Yes, the National Trust for Historic Preservation occasionally brings the matter up, and I suppose the ACHP talks about it in its general advice columns, but does it come up in the course of Section 106 review? Do SHPOs or the ACHP ever ask agencies about Sections 110 and 111 when the agencies come screaming in with proposals to knock down old buildings so they can build new ones? Does anybody bring it up during NEPA scoping? Not that I’ve seen. The attitude seems to be: “well, we can’t really expect the agencies to do that kind of proactive stuff.”

Maybe we can’t, but Congress did, and pretty directly told them to do it, and it strikes me that it wouldn’t hurt, from time to time, to throw that fact up in the faces of agencies that expect their consultants, SHPOs, the ACHP, and the concerned public to twist themselves into pretzels to help them fast-track their projects through the Section 106 process. I wonder what terrible things would happen if agencies were regularly reminded that NHPA continues on beyond Section 106.

Beefing up Protection for Graves

Tribes and others interested in enhanced protection for ancestral graves might want to take a look at the bill currently being considered in the Guam legislature; it's on the web at http://www.guamlegislature.com/Bills_Introduced_31st/Bill%20No.%20B001-31%20%28LS%29.pdf.  I've only skimmed it, but it certainly looks like a serious effort to put some teeth into burial protection.

It’s Not Easy Being a Statistic

A few days ago, the historic preservation lists flashed an urgent appeal. We were warned that the U.S. Congress might be about to make drastic cuts in the Historic Preservation Fund (which supports the State and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs, THPOs), zero out the “Save America’s Treasures” and perhaps the “Preserve America” special grant funds, and make deep cuts in funding for Heritage Areas. We were all urged to contact our Senators and Congresspeople insisting that they resist any such cuts.

Naturally, I immediately sent the following message to both my Senators (Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin) and my Congressperson, Donna Edwards:

As a long-time professional in historic preservation and environmental impact assessment, I am being urged to contact you opposing the proposed cuts in funding for such Department of the Interior programs as "Save America's Treasures" and "Preserve America," as well as funding for State Historic Preservation Officers. I want you to know that I SUPPORT these proposed cuts, and more. The Historic Preservation Fund program administered by the National Park Service has become bloated, swollen, and divorced from any apparent purpose. It badly needs through re-thinking and re-design, which MIGHT result from a deliberate kick in its fiscal pants. I urge you to support such a kick.

The ensuing silence has been deafening from Senator Cardin and Representative Edwards, but I very promptly received the following robo-response from Senator Mikulski:

I share your support for preserving our national heritage. Historic preservation projects such as the Save America's Treasures, Preserve America, and National Heritage Areas programs help ensure that our historic landmarks and buildings will be there for future generations. These valuable resources give people the opportunity to appreciate our national heritage and learn about America's history. Once gone, these resources will be lost forever.

As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, I have worked aggressively for programs that benefit Maryland and our country and will continue to do so. Knowing of your support for historic preservation will be helpful to me as the appropriations process moves forward. You can be sure that I will give your request for full funding for these worthy programs every consideration.

I drafted the following rejoinder before I realized that the Senator’s system provided no way for me to send it:

Senator Mikulski -- Your staffer who prepared the response to my post must not have read what I sent. AS a dedicated preservationist, I support CUTTING the wasteful fat out of the federal preservation program; I do NOT follow the mindless party line of supporting every federal program in historic preservation. Based on 45 years experience inside and outside the federal historic preservation establishment, I am appalled at the waste of money allocated particularly to NPS historic preservation programs and such feel-good grant programs as "Save America's Treasures." There is a real need to rethink the national historic preservation program, and I can only hope that a significant reduction in happy money would force the preservation powers that be to undertake it.

We can, of course, argue about the substantive utility or inutility of cutting NPS historic preservation funding, but it’s not my intent here to promote that argument. My purpose instead is to express the sadness and frustration I feel upon learning that even a legislator as experienced and thoughtful as Senator Mikulski automatically assumes that anyone identifying himself as a preservation specialist, or writing about preservation, must want to support throwing federal money at NPS, the SHPOs, and the various grant programs.

Is it, to members of Congress, unimaginable that someone involved in preservation might also engage in independent thought?

Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review: The President's New Executive Order and Historic Preservation

Introduction

On January 18, 2011, President Obama issued an executive order (which doesn’t seem yet to have been assigned a number) entitled “Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review.” The order articulates some excellent principles that I’ll get to in a moment, but first let’s skip toward the order’s end and look at its action-forcing paragraphs. These are found in Section 6, and speak to all executive branch agencies:

Sec. 6. Retrospective Analyses of Existing Rules. (a) To facilitate the periodic review of existing significant regulations, agencies shall consider how best to promote retrospective analysis of rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them in accordance with what has been learned. Such retrospective analyses, including supporting data, should be released online whenever possible.


(b) Within 120 days of the date of this order, each agency shall develop and submit to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs a preliminary plan, consistent with law and its resources and regulatory priorities, under which the agency will periodically review its existing significant regulations to determine whether any such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency's regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives.

So agencies, within 120 days, are to initiate plans to examine their regulations and fix them up to make them “more effective or less burdensome” – or, presumably, both.

This requirement is as applicable to the two federal agencies responsible for rulemaking (that is, regulation-issuance) under the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) as it is to the rest of the federal establishment. Pursuant to the executive order those two agencies – the National Park Service (NPS) and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something creative and responsible with their regulations – but almost certainly will resist doing so. They will argue either that their regulations don’t really regulate anything (the obvious out for NPS), or that they’re just fine as they are (the ACHP’s likely angle).

This is too bad, because in fact the interlinked, overlapping NHPA-based regulations overseen by the two agencies create many inefficiencies and are not very effective at achieving their purposes. They cost millions if not billions of unnecessary dollars, and place undue burdens on a considerable cross-section of the American public, including a range of industries and businesses large and small, local and state governments, Indian tribes and other indigenous groups, low-income and minority groups, property owners, and just plain citizens – including citizens who support historic preservation.

The ACHP and NPS ought to develop and implement review plans in cooperation with one another (as well as with all us stakeholders), because many of the gross inefficiencies of their regulatory systems, much of their undue complexity, much of the burden they place on industry and citizenry alike, result from interactions between the systems.

Complexity and Burdens: a Hypothetical Example

As noted above, NPS and ACHP will doubtless claim that they’re not really regulatory agencies and don’t need to do anything, and that besides, their regulations are just fine and everyone’s happy with them. To understand why they’re wrong, and why they (or better, someone else who isn’t deeply invested in the status quo) ought to perform the review the President orders, consider a hypothetical project – say, a small energy-production facility that requires a federal license or funding, or uses federal land. This project requires review under Section 106 of NHPA and the regulations of the ACHP (36 CFR 800). Let’s assume that the project proponent – call her Polly – is a responsible sort, as interested in doing right by the law, the environment, and the public interest as she is in the project’s bottom line. So she sets out to comply with 36 CFR 800 (and the National Environmental Policy Act – NEPA – but that’s another whole can of regulatory worms).

But the proponent in fact can’t comply with 36 CFR 800, because Section 106 of NHPA applies only to federal agencies. There may or may not be a federal agency clearly involved when Polly Proponent begins to develop her plans, or there may be several – or some may be involved at the outset while others are waiting in the wings. The result is that review of Polly’s project may be delayed until a federal agency is unambiguously involved, and by the time this happens Polly may have invested a lot of time and money in her project, limiting her ability or willingness to consider alternatives if it turns out her preferred approach will have serious impacts.

So here’s Problem #1 – Ambiguous, uncertain, or late federal involvement: Section 106 review was invented back when many if not most federal projects were directly undertaken by federal agencies. Today, many if not most projects in which the federal government is involved are actually planned and promoted by private parties or local/state governments. Federal agencies may become involved in a project rather late in planning. The Section 106 regulations quite reasonably insist that the law be complied with early in planning, when there’s lots of room for adjustment and consideration of alternatives, but at that early stage, there may be no federal agency involved. As a result, review may be delayed until many alternatives have been foreclosed, and there’s little wiggle room left.

Let’s suppose a federal agency gets involved in Polly’s project – or maybe a couple of Federal agencies do, and they initiate review. Polly may at this point run into another problem – call it Problem #1a – in that the agencies involved may have understandings and interpretations of their Section 106 responsibilities that are unique to themselves, and these understandings may conflict with one another, confusing and complicating review of Polly’s project. This isn’t exactly the ACHP’s or NPS’s fault, so let’s just note it and skip over it – though it’s certainly imaginable that thoughtful review of the regulatory system could help relieve the confusion.

The agency responsible for Polly’s project – let’s call it the Agency for Federal Assistance (AFA) -- now seeks to initiate Section 106 review. The Section 106 regulations say that it’s to do so by contacting the relevant State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) , coordinating with other reviews (e.g. NEPA review) and identifying other parties – stakeholders – with which it should consult.  Under some circumstances the agency consults with one or more Tribal Historic Preservation Officers in lieu of or in addition to the SHPO, but to keep the discussion relatively simple (sic), let's stick with the SHPO.

And in consulting the SHPO, the agency is likely to be quite systematically misled as a result of NPS regulations and practice. NPS partly funds the SHPOs, and hence oversees how they perform their functions – including their consultation with agencies under Section 106. But NPS regulations (36 CFR 61) and procedures (extensive and obscure) dealing with SHPO operations go into loving detail about SHPO duties relating to things of interest to NPS (notably the National Register of Historic Places – see below), while largely ignoring SHPO responsibilities vis-à-vis Section 106. To the extent NPS procedures do touch on Section 106-related SHPO responsibilities, they are out of date; the Section 106 regulations have changed several times, and practice under Section 106 has evolved considerably, over the two decades or so since NPS last re-thought its SHPO review procedures.

So the agency holding the SHPO’s purse-strings – NPS – does little or nothing to encourage SHPOs to advise agencies about how to comply with Section 106 in a manner that’s consistent with the ACHP’s regulations. An SHPO may do so without such encouragement, of course, but he or she will not be rewarded for doing so when NPS doles out its grant moneys.

This is Problem #2: The interaction between ACHP and NPS procedures, via the SHPOs, does not encourage early, thoughtful initiation of Section 106 review in coordination with NEPA and in consultation with stakeholders.

The AFA, if it is like most federal agencies, wants to consult with just as few people as possible, and do the least work it can, in reviewing Polly’s project. AFA very likely believes – this belief is quite widespread, though utterly inconsistent with the regulations – that Section 106 simply requires them to seek “clearance” or approval for Polly’s project from the SHPO, or that the SHPO will tell them if the project presents any historic preservation issues.

So AFA drops the plans for Polly’s project on the SHPO and asks what the SHPO thinks – expecting to be told definitively whether Polly has any historic preservation problems. Under the Section 106 regulations, what the SHPO ought to do at this point is provide AFA with recommendations about how to identify any potentially affected historic properties, caution AFA to make sure it coordinates its 106 consultation with review under NEPA, and point AFA toward any other parties who ought to be brought into consultation. The SHPO may do these things, but since he or she gets no encouragement to do so from NPS, there’s no guarantee.

The SHPO may just tell AFA what’s in the “state inventory” – the list of places the state has identified that may have historic value. The inventory is very incomplete; no state has had the money to “complete” its inventory, and since history marches on, and discoveries are made all the time, and historic significance is in the minds of evaluators, the very notion of a “complete” historic property inventory is something of an oxymoron. But one possibility is that AFA assumes that the inventory is complete, notes that there’s nothing recorded in any of the locations that Polly’s considering, and tells Polly she has nothing to worry about when it comes to Section 106. This, of course, may be true but it probably isn’t; the reason there’s nothing in the inventory is probably that nobody’s looked at Polly’s potential project sites.

More likely, the SHPO will tell AFA that it doesn’t know of anything in the areas Polly’s looking at, and recommends that a survey be done to find out what is there. The SHPO quite likely has detailed standards for survey work – NPS encourages the development of such standards. The standards probably go into some detail about having archaeologists walk over every foot of the ground, digging holes every so often, while architectural historians look at and photograph all the buildings, and everybody does background research. What they almost certainly do not say much about is finding out what living people in the potentially affected areas (or elsewhere) think about those areas – unless those people are archaeologists, architectural historians, or perhaps Indian tribes – because NPS doesn’t encourage SHPOs to worry about that kind of thing (except where tribes are involved, based on a large corpus of action-forcing law).

Polly – a responsible sort, remember – has several possible alternative locations for her energy project, and some of them are quite large. She doesn’t have access to all of them yet. It will cost her a great deal of money to contract for surveys of them all, done to the SHPO’s standards. She objects, and the AFA takes her objection to the SHPO. They decide that Polly can get by with background study at this point, and put off full scale survey until a final project site has been identified.

So Polly’s historic preservation contractor does a vague general paper on the history and prehistory of the region, which goes in the project’s NEPA documents, but does nothing more about impacts on historic properties until Polly and AFA have selected a preferred alternative. By this time Polly has invested quite a lot of money in project planning. Now, at the eleventh hour, her consultants finally get out on the ground in the preferred alternative area, and – whoops! – they find something. Or – this is not uncommon – the consultants don’t find something, but others (those folks whose views haven’t been sought during earlier phases of planning), learn about the project because its NEPA document has been distributed or it’s gotten into the local papers or been touted on the internet, and they raise concerns. Maybe these concerns are about, say, an ancestral burial place an Indian tribe says will be disturbed, or maybe local people who really like the pristine views across the proposed project site raise aesthetic arguments. Whatever the concerns, they’re raised late in the planning process, when it’s going to cost Polly megabucks to do anything about them – if she can do anything at all.

So, Problem #3: By failing to ensure that stakeholders are involved early in the process, by failing to provide effectively for coordination with NEPA and similar reviews, and by imposing standards that promote delay in the identification of affected historic properties until alternatives have been foregone, the interaction between NPS and ACHP regulations almost guarantees late-breaking conflicts that waste money and time.

But it gets worse. Now that something has been identified in the area to be affected by the project, the Section 106 regulations require that its eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places be determined. Never mind that the tribe is deeply concerned about impacts on its ancestors’ burial place; never mind that the local aesthetic society is wild about what’s going to happen to the viewshed; we can’t consider impacts on such a place under Section 106 unless it’s eligible for the Register. And conversely, even if the only thing found is a pile of tin cans on the edge of the project site, and nobody gives a damn about it, it has to be evaluated for Register eligibility.

And here the ACHP and NPS regulations part company rather dramatically. The ACHP regulations (at 36 CFR 800.4(c)(2)) permit an agency and SHPO simply to decide that something is or is not eligible for the Register and move on, with provision for resolving objections raised by others. But NPS regulations (36 CFR 63) require that if an agency and SHPO decide that a property is eligible, the agency must submit detailed documentation to NPS, in the person of the Keeper of the National Register, who makes a final decision. If the agency and SHPO decide that the property is not eligible, though, they can treat it as such with no further review; in other words AFA can let Polly blow it away, and never mind the tribe or the aesthetes.

In determining eligibility, agencies, consultants, SHPOs and others apply criteria set forth in NPS regulations at 36 CFR 60.4. These criteria are very abstract and subject to interpretation by professional historians, architectural historians, and archaeologists – who are, for all practical purposes, the only people allowed by NPS and ACHP regulations to interpret them. Applying them can become the subject of intense, abstruse argumentation, taking up more time with little practical utility. SHPOs and NPS also commonly demand a great deal of documentation to support a determination of eligibility, grounding their demands (if they bother to explain them at all) in a considerable corpus of NPS guidance (based ultimately on regulations at 36 CFR 60) relating to the formal nomination of properties to the Register. This sort of documentation is often unnecessary for purposes of eligibility determination, but is insisted upon anyway as a matter of consistency (See Ralph Waldo Emerson for a succinct comment on this kind of consistency).

This is Problem #4: The ACHP and NPS regulations together focus attention on properties that meet abstract criteria interpretable only by professionals in specified academic disciplines, employing unduly complicated processes and generating unnecessary paperwork. The evaluation system is virtually impenetrable by outsiders, and can be very time-consuming. It can elevate the “official,” government-sanctioned significance of things that no one cares much about, while denigrating the significance of places about which people are deeply concerned. The character of the criteria, and the divergence between the ACHP and NPS regulations, create many opportunities for time-wasting arguments over petty technical and procedural issues.

Assuming something is found eligible for the National Register, the next step in the process is to determine whether the project will affect it, and if so, how. Here the regulations of the ACHP (36 CFR 800.5) hold sway, but the SHPO is an important interpreter of those regulations, and is held to account by NPS. The regulations allow for projects to fall into any of four categories – no historic properties subject to effect, no adverse effect, no adverse effect with conditions, and adverse effect. If there will be an adverse effect, the agency, SHPO, and others consult further, seeking agreement about how to “resolve” the adversity. There is much room for argument over how to interpret the regulations. Although the regulations do not say so, there is a widespread perception that it is wrong to have an adverse effect, so agencies tend to seek “no adverse effect” determinations. SHPOs tend to resist concurring in such determinations. SHPO and ACHP staff also tend to interpret the language of the regulations to require a rigidly sequential process of first exploring alternatives to avoid adverse effects, then alternatives to minimize them, and only if these prove infeasible, alternatives to mitigate them somehow – regardless of the severity of the impact or the significance of the property. Arguments over such petty issues can take up a great deal of time, including time spent by pricy consultants.

Thus, Problem 5: The overall effect of the Section 106 regulations, interacting with NPS regulations and procedures, is to reduce consideration of effects on historic properties to technical argumentation over petty points of regulatory interpretation and professional preference, with little opportunity for the public to become fruitfully involved.

Conclusion: Fixing the Problems

For those unfamiliar with the Section 106 process, I should say that Polly will probably get her project constructed – regardless of its effects on historic properties or the broader environment. She’ll probably wind up spending a good deal of money on “resolving” its impacts through such things as archaeological data recovery – on top of what she’s spent struggling through the review process. If worst comes to worst, if the project will have adverse effects and the AFA, Polly,and the SHPO can’t agree on what to do about them, the ACHP will comment to the head of AFA, who will make its final decision.

All that said, and despite all the problems outlined above, there is much that is worthwhile in the Section 106 process. Notably, it’s very nearly the only regulatory process in the federal government that emphasizes getting concerned parties together to consult over and work out their differences about how impacts on an aspect of the environment should be characterized and dealt with. It could be a model for other such review processes, had it not been allowed to evolve into such a petty, impenetrable, unnecessarily cumbersome and ill-focused enterprise.

What can be done? That remains to be seen, but I hope someone in the administration can and will force the ACHP and NPS to get off their self-satisfied duffs and reconsider the whole regulatory complex with reference to the excellent principles the President set out in the introduction to his executive order – to wit:

“Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation. It must be based on the best available science. It must allow for public participation and an open exchange of ideas. It must promote predictability and reduce uncertainty. It must identify and use the best, most innovative, and least burdensome tools for achieving regulatory ends. It must take into account benefits and costs, both quantitative and qualitative. It must ensure that regulations are accessible, consistent, written in plain language, and easy to understand. It must measure, and seek to improve, the actual results of regulatory requirements.”

I want especially to point to the third and seventh sentences in this statement of principles. The complex of regulations surrounding and structuring Section 106 review give lip service (and even that only sometimes) to public participation and the exchange of ideas, but they do not really facilitate either, and they are a long, long way from being accessible, consistent, written in plain language, or easy to understand (The NEPA regulations, I should mention, are even worse). They could be made very much better. I hope – but don’t expect – that President Obama’s executive order will trigger a process that leads to such improvements.

"Tribal Monitoring"

A posting on ACRA-L reminds me that Indian tribes in California continue to be hoodwinked into thinking that the cultural resource laws require, and require only, "tribal monitoring" of construction projects.  Here's a paper I did several years ago for a class I took part in at the request of Reba Fuller of Tuolumne Rancheria, that tries to explain why tribes should not get fixated on monitoring, even in California where (sadly) it's become common practice.

WHY “MONITORING”

IS NOT NECESSARILY A GOOD IDEA

Thomas F. King: Prepared for a class at the Tuolumne Rancheria, 2007

Project proponents, government agencies, and environmental consulting firms in California often propose “monitoring” as a means of mitigating the effects of construction and other land-modifying activities on ancestral sites.

“Monitoring” means watching the bulldozing and recording or salvaging whatever may be found (graves, artifacts, etc.). Sometimes it’s done by tribal representatives, sometimes by archaeologists, sometimes by both.

Monitoring may often be necessary, but it should not be the first or primary option a tribe accepts, for at least the following reasons:

• The environmental and cultural resource laws are planning laws; they give tribes and others the opportunity to influence project planning. When you opt for monitoring, you give up your influence on planning.

• Accepting monitoring means you accept that the project as planned will go forward. The streets will go here, the houses will go there, the shopping mall will go over there – perhaps with some room for shifting things a little bit this way or that, but usually not much.

• If monitors find something important, practically speaking it is very unlikely that they’re going to be able to stop destruction of the place where that something lies. The best they’re likely to be able to do is delay destruction for awhile, while someone removes whatever has been found and puts it in a safe place.

• Monitoring can be applied only to small, discrete things like artifacts and graves; it cannot work to protect sites and natural areas.

Simply put, monitoring is one tool that may be agreed on as part of a plan to manage and protect cultural resources, but it should seldom if ever be the only tool, or the first thing discussed. Tribes should insist that project proponents and agencies first fully explore ways actually to protect ancestral places without disturbing them, and ways to compensate for loss or damage to such places, before considering monitoring.

Enforcing Section 106

I understand that at the recent meeting in Palm Springs, California to discuss tribal cultural issues with energy development, some tribes were particularly vehement about the need for Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and maybe the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to be enforced more vigorously.


This is an interesting issue, and not as straightforward as one might think. For a very insightful discussion, let me recommend "Two Shades of Green," issued some years ago by the Rand Corporation. “Two Shades” compared how the Army complies with environmental laws that feature outside enforcement (Clean Air Act [CAA], Clean Water Act [CWS], etc.) and those that are supposed to be self-enforcing (NEPA, 106, etc.). It found, not surprisingly, that the Army did a helluva lot better with the former than with the latter. The report's downloadable at http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R4220.html, and worth reading.

BUT it's a lot easier to enforce such hard-edged laws like CAA and CWA, which say things like "thou shalt not pump more than X ppm of gunk into the environment," than it is to enforce soft, squishy, process-oriented laws like 106 and NEPA, and even CAA/CWA enforcement doesn't work perfectly (See, for example, Our Unprotected Heritage [Left Coast Press 2009], pp 47-48, 135-6). AND such enforcement requires a largish bureaucracy (at USEPA and the state EPAs) to carry out.

And most importantly, I think it's an unavoidable rule that the tighter the enforcement of an environmental law, the more narrowly and nit-pickingly the subject of the law will be defined. If you think we have problems now with issues like “how big is your traditional cultural property,” just wait till you start trying to enforce legal protections for such properties.

I don’t mean to discourage tribes or anyone else from considering how to enforce the laws, or to otherwise make them work better. I’m just saying that it’s something of a trick to imagine how enforcement could be built into NEPA or 106 without greatly restricting the scope of their application. It'd be interesting to try, but would need to be undertaken with considerable care and creativity.

A Devilish Definition

I’ve just become aware of a draft Department of the Interior (DOI) tribal consultation policy that’s been posted on the web at http://www.doi.gov/governments/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&pageid=119393 . The status of this document is not clear to me, but it’s being reviewed and commented on by tribes and, I take it, some DOI agencies. Whether, how, and when it will be made available for public review and comment is a mystery to me.

At a glance, the policy looks like a well-meaning document whose devils are, as usual, in the details. One detail that jumped out at me on first reading is at Section III.D, the definition of “Departmental Action with Tribal Implications.” This is a very important definition, DATIs are the things that DOI agencies are directed to consult about. If it’s a DATI you consult; if it’s not a DATI you don’t have to. Here’s the definition:

Departmental Action with Tribal Implications – Regulation, rulemaking, policy, guidance, legislative proposal made by the Department, grant funding formula changes, or operational activity that may have a substantial direct effect on Tribe or Tribal members’ traditional way of life, Tribal lands, Tribal resources, or access to traditional areas of cultural or religious importance on Federally-managed lands; or the ability of the Tribe to govern its members or to provide services to its members; or that may impact the Tribe(s) relationship with the Department or the distribution of responsibilities between the Department and Indian Tribes. This term does not include matters that are the subject of litigation or in settlement negotiations, or matters that undertaken in accordance with an administrative or judicial order.

Right off the bat, I see several problems with this definition.

One is its very existence. What earthly business does the Department of the Interior have deciding what does and does not have “tribal implications?” Surely only a tribe can decide what has implications for it and its people. Is it sensible, or fair, for the actor – the one contemplating an action – to decide whether it has implications for those acted upon, without even talking with them?

Now, of course, pragmatically a line has to be drawn somewhere; it would be absurd to have, say, the U.S. Park Police consulting with tribes about what fuel mix to use in their helicopters. But there’s got to be a better way than issuing this sort of peremptory definition.

And insult is added to injury – or maybe it’s vice versa, by the language “that may have a substantial direct effect.” Who, pray, is going to decide what’s “substantial” as opposed to “insubstantial?” Or “direct” as opposed to “indirect,” or maybe “cumulative?” Nit-picky lawyers will have a field day with this. And what’s the rationale for NOT considering indirect effects, or the contribution of an action to cumulative effects? We consider such impacts under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) – and in the latter case we even consult about them. Are we now going to have DOI agencies saying “well, we consult with everybody ELSE about indirect and cumulative effects, but our policy is NOT to consult with tribes?

Then there’s the language about “areas of cultural or religious importance on Federally-managed lands.” So DOI agencies don’t have to talk with tribes about impacts on areas of cultural and religious importance unless they’re on Federally-managed lands? So if DOI is, say, going to permit implantation of a vast bank of solar arrays on a chunk of public land that’s within the viewshed of a tribal sacred mountain that happens to be on private land, that action has no tribal implications? Give us a break!

Finally, there’s the perfectly wonderful exclusion for “matters that are the subject of litigation or in settlement negotiations, or matters that undertaken in accordance with an administrative or judicial order.” This one discriminates not only against tribes, but against the English language. We’re talking, here, about a definition of “action with tribal implications.” It ought to be offensive to any rational English speaker to see matters of litigation – in which, one has to assume, a tribe might often be a litigant – defined as having no tribal implications. So we have a tribe fighting the Department tooth and claw over, say, a project affecting a spiritual place, or culturally important plants or animals, and as soon as they go to court the matter stops having tribal implications?

Of course, it’s perfectly understandable that when a case goes to court, it’s going to have a chilling effect on other forms of interaction between the parties, and DOI is perfectly justified in not wanting to create a policy that will limit its maneuvering room in the conduct of litigation. That has to be addressed, and I’m sure ways can be found to do so, but the sort of gross misuse of the language that’s reflected in this definition is simply not the way.

I don’t doubt the good-faith intent of the Department of the Interior to consult with tribes, but this kind of pettifogging definition mongering is not going to help advance that intent. “Departmental action with tribal implications” ought to be defined to mean whatever an agency of DOI does that a tribe thinks has implications for it, and agencies ought to consult programmatically with tribes to decide what they’re going to consult about and what they aren’t.

Who Gives a Rat’s Patootie?

Once again, I find myself being asked about how to resolve a Section 106 question in which both the responsible agency and the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) seem to be agonizing over obscure abstractions without asking the obvious, first-order, real-world question of whether anybody thinks the issue is a matter of concern.

The case involves rather minor new construction on a federal facility, marginal to a complex of buildings long ago determined eligible for the National Register, and adjacent to a seemingly rather ordinary building that may (or may not) be just barely old enough to be part of the complex’s defined “period of significance.” There is great angst over whether the proposed site (a parking lot) is or is not within the “district” and whether the building “contributes to the district’s significance.”

What nobody has asked, and nobody seems to have the mother wit TO ask, is “who cares?” Despite the fact that the Section 106 regulations clearly establish that one of the very first things an agency is supposed to do in initiating review is to “identify other (than the SHPO) consulting parties” (36 CFR 800.3(f)), defined as people with “legal or economic relation to the undertaking or affected properties, or … concern with the undertaking's effects on historic properties” (36 CFR 800.2(c)(5)). Neither agency nor SHPO, it appears, has even given thought to the question of whether anybody cares if the construction occurs on the proposed site, or about the historical/architectural character of the location. When I ask about this, the response I get is “we don’t think anyone gives a damn,” and that, I would guess, is almost certainly true, but absent some effort to DETERMINE whether anyone gives a damn, the agency has, at best, a flawed administrative record. What we PROBABLY have here is a fairly easy “no adverse effect” situation, but if the agency makes that determination, without SOME effort to identify and talk with people who may be concerned, then in the perhaps unlikely event there IS someone out there who’s concerned, the agency can get caught with its pants loosely draped around its quivering ankles.

I don’t blame the agency in this case; it’s trying to juggle lots of variables that need to be addressed in planning a needed facility, and it’s just doing what it’s been long instructed to do (albeit misguidedly) to comply with 106: “go to the SHPO and ask if it’s OK.” But I DO blame the SHPO, and the National Park Service that’s supposed to be overseeing how SHPOs do their business. By not giving the agencies straight advice about what they really need to do to comply with Section 106, the SHPOs encourage agencies to blunder on and waste everyone's time building molehill issues into mountainous unnecessary complexities. 

NPS needs to acquaint itself with the Section 106 regulations, which it’s shown no evidence of having read since approximately 1988, and then it needs to remind the SHPOs (who shouldn’t need it, but apparently do) that the bottom line in Section 106 review is determining the public interest, and that you can’t do that without talking to people. Which is why – yes, there IS a reason! – the regulations call for identifying consulting parties at the very beginning of the review process.

Sheesh, people, why is this so hard?

Contents: Wiley-Blackwell Companion to CRM

In response to requests (well, a request), here's the table of contents of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Resource Management, scheduled for publication in the UK and US this spring.

Introduction
Thomas F. King

Part I. General Classes of Cultural Resources
Chapter 1 – Studying and Evaluating the Built Environment
Kate Kuranda
Chapter 2 – Principles of Architectural Preservation
David Ames & Leila Hamroun
Chapter 3 – Archaeology of the Distant Past
Michael J. Moratto
Chapter 4 – Archaeology of the Recent Past
Thomas F. King
Chapter 5 -Geographies of Cultural Resource Management: Space, Place and Landscape
William M. Hunter
Chapter 6 - Culturally Significant Natural Resources: Where Nature and Culture Meet
Anna J. Willow
Chapter 7 – History as a Cultural Resource
Deborah Morse-Kahn
Chapter 8 - Portable Cultural Property: “This Belongs in a Museum?”
Wendy Teeter
Chapter 9 - "Intangible" Cultural Resources: Values are in the Mind
Sheri Murray Ellis
Chapter 10 – Religious Belief and Practice
Michael D. McNally
Chapter 11 - Language as an Integrated Cultural Resource
Bernard Perley

Part II. Special Types of Cultural Resources
Chapter 12 - Challenges of Maritime Archaeology: In Too Deep
Sean Kingsley
Chapter 13 - Historic Watercraft: Keeping Them Afloat
Susan B.M. Langley
Chapter 14 - Historic Aircraft and Spacecraft: Enfants TerriblesRic Gillespie
Chapter 15 - Studying and Managing Aerospace Crash Sites
Craig Fuller and Gary Quigg
Chapter 16 - Evaluating and Managing Technical and Scientific Properties: Rockets, Tang™, and Telescopes
Paige M. Peyton
Chapter 17 – Historic Battlefields: Studying and Managing Fields of Conflict
Nancy Farrell
Chapter 18 - Managing Our Military Heritage
D. Colt Denfeld
Chapter 19 - Linear Resources and Linear Projects: All in Line
Charles W Wheeler
Chapter 20 - Rock Art as Cultural Resource
Linea Sundstrom and Kelley Hays-Gilpin

Part III. Perspectives on Cultural Resource Management
Chapter 21 – Consultation in Cultural Resource Management: An Indigenous Perspective
Reba Fuller
Chapter 22 - A Displaced People’s Perspective on Cultural Resource Management: Where We’re From
David Nickell

Part IV. Legal, Administrative, and Practical Contexts
Chapter 23 – Cultural Resource Laws: The Legal Mélange
Thomas F. King
Chapter 24 – International Variety in Cultural Resource Management
Thomas J. Green
Chapter 25 – Consultation and Negotiation in Cultural Resource Management
Claudia Nissley
Chapter 26 – Being a U.S. Government Cultural Resource Manager
Russell L. Kaldenberg
Chapter 27 – Making a Living in Private Sector Cultural Resource Management
Tom Lennon
Chapter 28 - The Historic Built Environment: Preservation and Planning
Diana Painter
Chapter 29 – CRM and the Military: Cultural Resource Management at War
Michael K. Trimble and Susan Malin-Boyce
Chapter 30 - A Future for Cultural Resource Management?
Thomas F. King

Buried

I was just asked (by a client, unfortunately) where the hell I am, since I’ve been relatively quiet in cyberspace lately. Quick answer for anyone else who may wonder: I’m buried, but will, I am intent, dig out within the next week or so. The burial is not in snow, or even paying work, but in indexing the Companion to Cultural Resource Management, which Wiley-Blackwell will publish in March (See http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405198737.html).

Although indexing involves mostly just plowing through the manuscript (a PDF) identifying and tagging items that someone might want to refer to, and organizing these into an alphabetical list, it’s not entirely without interest. For example, can you guess how many times 32 authors of 30 chapters on CRM topics use the word “standards?” Answer: 120. Now, does one index every use of the word, or only those referring to specific standards? Answer (for me): the latter. But how specific? Does a reference to UNESCO standards in general qualify, or only a reference to a specific UNESCO recommendation? What about a comment on the relevance of SHPO-generated standards? And what about standards set forth by the Companion’s authors themselves? Sheri Ellis provides some useful standards for dealing with “intangible” cultural resources, derived from the UNESCO convention on the same; should I index these? (Answer: yes). Reba Fuller provides some thoughtful guidelines for consulting with indigenous communities, based on the UN declaration of their rights; do I index these, even though she doesn’t exactly call them standards? (Answer: yep, those too). And by the way, yes, thank you, President Obama, for bringing the U.S. into the community of responsible (or at least self-congratulatory) nations by endorsing that declaration – now will you kindly direct your *&^%$# Secretary of the Interior to get on board and do something tangible about it? Like re-thinking the give-away of the western deserts to the solar industry without meaningful tribal consultation?

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to, and my deadline for getting it done – and proofing the 565-page ms – is January 10. Don't be shy about dropping me a note between now and then, but please understand that I may be long getting back to you. And clients, yes, I certainly WILL get your work done.

Environmental Conflict Resolution and Section 106: a Minor Epiphany

I’m grateful to Western Cultural Resource Management, Inc. (WCRM) for making it possible for me to take part in its training last week in Reno, NV. The training was in environmental conflict resolution (ECR); the class was taught by Joan Calcagno of the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution at the Udall Foundation, University of Arizona. I think that Tom Lennon and his colleagues are very much to be commended for trying to make WCRM into more than the usual walk-the-transect-and-dig-the-hole cultural resource management firm by getting familiar with the principles and methods of things like ECR.

As one who’s theoretically been doing ECR for decades, in the guise of project review under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, I experienced a mild sort of epiphany during the training. Joan spent a good deal of time discussing what makes a case ripe for ECR – what conditions have to be present. I found myself thinking that it must be nice to be able to think about ripeness; in the 106 game we don’t have that luxury. The only game in the town of 106 review is ECR, in the form of consultation as prescribed in the regulations. Which led me to think -- here's the epiphany -- that this uniformity, this absence of options, may be the central flaw in the regulatory process.

The regulations, it occurred to me, essentially assume that there is always some kind of conflict to be resolved, requiring a more or less standard sort of multi-party (though often only bi-party) consultation. And they give little to no direction about how to decide how much consultation is necessary. The only real guidance is that if a project will have “adverse effects,” it requires some more consultation, sort of, than does a project without such effects.

And “adverse effect” is defined in a very abstract, theoretical way – you have an adverse effect if you’re going to diminish the integrity of a historic property. It doesn’t matter if you’re just going to diminish it a little bit or a lot, and more importantly it doesn’t matter whether anybody objects to the diminution. Everybody involved can be happy as clams with what you’re going to do to the place, and you’ve still got to go through the motions of consultation and execute a memorandum of agreement. On the other hand, some people can hate what’s proposed, and that doesn’t trigger any higher level of review – unless, of course, the haters are State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) staff, based on whatever technical standards they elect to apply.

Inevitably, such a system allocates unnecessary time, effort and angst to routine, non-controversial projects, while allocating insufficient resources and attention to projects that are troublesome. And there’s nothing in the system to flag troublesome projects early on, alert people to one another’s concerns, and allow people to think about whether there’s the need for some form of ECR. And because it’s so cumbersome, and mind-numbing, to try to consult about every single project, applying the abstract criteria of adverse effect (to say nothing of the National Register criteria), agencies and SHPOs get frantic to find means of “streamlining.” They negotiate programmatic agreements (PAs) to achieve this objective, but since nobody has a model other than what’s in the regulations, the PAs that get negotiated tend to be weird permutations on the standard Section 106 process that usually exacerbate its faults and dilute its strengths.

Although I think the National Trust for Historic Preservation was right, in its recent “Back to Basics” report, to call for a halt to PA development pending the establishment of better standards, it would be interesting to experiment with a PA that discriminated among projects not on the basis of their abstract effects on historical or architectural integrity but on the basis of the degree and kind of conflict they provoke. Perhaps if we could apply some of the principles that Joan Calcagno talked about in the WCRM class, we could come up with a more rational, simpler system of project review that’s more accessible to the public, more responsive to the public’s interests, and less taxing on all concerned.

A Visit to the Veterans Curation Project

I had a fascinating and, I might even say inspirational couple of hours yesterday visiting the Washington DC lab of the Veterans Curation Project. The VCP is the brainchild of the Corps of Engineers’ remarkable Sonny Trimble, and is currently funded with ARRA money, though a bill to give it permanent funding has passed the House and is – well, somewhere in the Senate.

The basic idea of the VCP is to train wounded veterans in the skills involved in artifact and archival curation – classification, catalogue-building, imaging, restoration of decaying documents, and so on – not with the necessary expectation that they’ll go into archaeology, museum studies, or historic preservation, but because the work teaches them things that are useful in a wide range of jobs, helps prepare them for higher education if that’s what they want, and (there’s some anecdotal evidence for this) may help overcome the effects of conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PDSD). The group of veterans I visited were working with an old collection of both artifacts and records from Richard B. Russell Reservoir; they seemed to be engaged, focused, interested in the work, and having a relatively good time. They were articulate in discussing their work, and seemed to be handling it with great patience and aplomb. Their supervisors, Alexandra Jones and Amelia Chisholm of Brockington & Associates, which runs the program for the Corps, seemed to have things very much in hand and to be getting along fine with the troops. I was really impressed.

Working these days as a consultant to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), I hope we can find ways to build on the strengths of the VCP (which VA co-sponsors with the Corps) and relate it in a systemic way to the VA’s historic preservation program. And I hope other agencies, institutions, organizations and firms will look to the VCP as a source of highly trained, skilled, motivated and disciplined curators.

Eruvim and TCPs

David Rotenstein has done another of his fascinating blog postings on Washington DC-area eruvim – see http://blog.historian4hire.net/2010/12/08/eruv-life/ . This one flatteringly quotes me (a dumb-as-dirt goy resident within the Silver Spring eruv) and mentions my connection with traditional cultural properties (TCPs; see for instance http://www.amazon.com/Traditional-Cultural-Properties-Resource-Management/dp/0759100713).

Before anyone starts jumping up and down about this, I wouldn’t for a moment propose that every eruv set up by an Orthodox Jewish community is a National Register eligible TCP. Some might be, I suppose, but I don’t think the mere designation of an area as an eruv would qualify it for the Register or impose any legal constraints on the activities of federal agencies in its vicinity.

The connection I found between eruvim and TCPs is this: I’ve lived within the boundaries of the Silver Spring eruv for about 30 years, and until David started publishing his research, I had no idea that this was the case. When I saw funny little sticks and strings running up utility poles, I figured they were something the power company had put in for some obscure electrical-engineering purpose – when I thought about them at all. Yesterday I saw one and thought: “Oh, a…..” and hurried home to check David’s site and remind myself that it was a lechi.

Anyway, it is much the same with, for instance, Indian tribal or Native Hawaiian spiritual places. Most of us live in, work in, travel through, view, or ignore such places without consideration of their spiritual qualities, because they aren’t marked with crosses, stars, crescents, or other such indicators of religiosity. And we never notice when we cross their boundaries, because those boundaries are marked, if they’re marked at all, in ways that only someone knowledgeable in the ways of the culture can recognize. But this general anonymity doesn’t make the places any less significant in the eyes of those who ARE within the culture. Just as a breached eruv boundary can have real effects on the perceptions and behaviors of an Orthodox Jew on the Sabbath, so a perceived violation of a tribal spiritual place’s important characteristics can affect the sociocultural integrity of a tribe – even though the violation is entirely innocent and the violator has no idea that he or she has done anything.

I doubt if knowing that I live in an eruv will alter my behavior, but if I were responsible for managing my neighborhood I’d certainly want to consult with the Orthodox Jewish community before, say, taking out a bunch of utility poles on a Friday – not because there’s a specific law requiring that I do so, but because I’d think such consultation to be the fundamental responsibility of a public servant. And I wouldn’t assume that I could determine just what actions would have impacts on the beliefs and values of my Jewish neighbors; only they could do this. In just the same way, a federal land manager ought to be careful about doing things that may impact the values, beliefs, and practices of tribes (and others) who view themselves as tied somehow to the lands being managed – not necessarily to avoid doing things, but to consult with those affected and to mitigate the effects.

The Federal Historic Preservation Program Task Force: a Reaction

For some months, the Usual non-federal Suspects in U.S. historic preservation – Preservation Action, the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers, National Trust for Historic Preservation, American Cultural Resources Association, and others – have been deliberating earnestly as the “Federal Historic Preservation Program Task Force” (See Preservationaction.org). Their task has been to examine the “external programs” in preservation managed by the National Park Service (NPS), assess their effectiveness, and come up with a “consensus plan for structural improvement,” which they will then seek to implement. The Task Force recently sent out a questionnaire to help inform its deliberations; like many others, I received a copy and amused myself for a quarter-hour or so completing it. If you haven’t gotten one yet, and want to, you can get it at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FederalPreservationSurvey.

The Task Force’s effort is timely – or rather, past-timely. NPS has neglected, ignored, twisted, and distorted the “external programs” for decades, and current NPS management has shown no evidence that it has the faintest understanding even of what these programs are supposed to do. NPS – understandably enough – looks at the world outside the National Parks as something strange, vaguely threatening, and only marginally relevant, so it has made the external programs focus inward, on parks and park resources, effectively ignoring the broader responsibilities imposed by the National Historic Preservation Act and other legal authorities. This has been going on for so long that it has come to be seen – at least within NPS – as the right and proper norm. The Task Force can be congratulated for rejecting the status quo world view, for recognizing that NPS has mismanaged its responsibilities, and for attempting to effect improvements.

Sadly, though, to judge from its questionnaire, the Task Force is unlikely to accomplish much. I say this not because I think, as is widely assumed, that under current economic and political conditions nothing can be accomplished (though there’s a good deal to be said for that assumption), but because the Task Force itself seems to be little more creative or engaged with the outside world than is NPS.

After asking, in essence, whether respondents agree that NPS has done a rotten job, and understandably assuming agreement, the Task Force’s questionnaire asks us to rank several alternative pathways to program improvement. These include:

1. Pulling the external programs out of NPS and putting them into an independent agency, together with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP);
2. Pulling the external programs out and giving them to the ACHP;
3. Coagulating the external programs, with or without the ACHP, into a new agency within the Department of the Interior;
4. Doing the same thing within NPS;
5. Gussying up the leadership of the external programs and ACHP with things like Senate ratification of appointments; and
6. Doing nothing.

Having warned about NPS proclivities and promoted option 1 above back in the mid-1970s (See Anthropology in Historic Preservation; http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Historic-Preservation-Cultures-Archeology/dp/0124082505), I suppose I should be pleased to see the mainstream historic preservation community at last come around, and of the options given us by the Task Force, I certainly think option 1 is the best. Only with an entity that’s outside the ambit of a particular land manager – be it NPS or its parent Department of the Interior – would it be possible to develop a program that addresses historic preservation interests right across the federal establishment, in partnership (or not) with a full range of governmental and non-governmental interests. This was true in the 1970s, and it’s still true – perhaps more true – now.

But what the Task Force members – devoted, self-congratulatory preservationists all – can’t see is that “historic preservation” by itself doesn’t have the political firepower to establish or operate its own government agency – nor should it.

First: the vast majority of Americans do not know what historic preservation is – except that it’s something that keeps nice (or not so nice) old buildings standing and sometimes complicates land use and development. Most of our elected representatives are no better informed. You’re not going to get political support for something that elicits at best polite nods from the bulk of the population and members of Congress – unless you have a lot more money to pay the latter than historic preservation’s Usual Suspects have in their pockets.

More importantly, the deficiencies of the national historic preservation program are not wholly ascribable to NPS mismanagement, and they are not unique to historic preservation.

Some of the preservation program’s deficiencies are built into the National Historic Preservation Act itself, or at least into how the Act was interpreted and implemented in its earliest days (1968-72 or thereabouts). The Act and its early interpreters (admittedly, mostly NPS employees) focused attention on old buildings and archaeological sites, and turned program management over to professional historians, architectural historians, and archaeologists, creating a program that systematically excluded the broad array of landscapes, landforms, plants, animals, vistas, viewsheds, soundscapes and smellscapes that encode the cultural values of many ordinary citizens and communities – to say nothing of the less tangible aspects of culture like language, song, and tradition. Some of us have tried to drag the broader aspects of culture into the program through inventions like the “traditional cultural property” or the “cultural landscape,” but with very limited success; the deck was long ago stacked against us. As a result, we live with a program that seeks to preserve places valued by narrow disciplinary professionals, a program run by narrow disciplinary professionals for the benefit of narrow disciplinary professionals. And the Usual Suspects are – surprise! – themselves mainly narrow disciplinary professionals, or at least narrowly focused on old buildings and archaeology. Generating broad public support for an independent agency to service the interests of narrow disciplinary professionals is going to be a real challenge.

But preservation’s deficiencies are not unique; the same or very similar narrow-mindedness infects virtually every other aspect of government-based environmental management. Management of the natural living environment, when not driven wholly by economic interests, is done by and essentially for professional biologists, foresters, and the like; water resources are managed by hydrologists according to their own self-contained models, and professional environmental engineers are forever insisting that they and only they can speak to management of “the environment.” In the operation of programs designed and administered by practitioners of narrow professional disciplines, the interests, values, feelings of ordinary people have no place. Just as a community’s sense of place is likely to be ignored by the historic preservation system unless a pricy consultant is retained to translate it into terms that resonate with historians or architects, the feelings of ordinary citizens for plants, animals, lakes, rivers, language, dances, or traditions go unattended unless someone makes them sensible to biologists, ecologists, or hydrologists.

Here is where opportunity lies. If preservation’s Usual Suspects could make common cause with other groups interested in preserving cultural aspects of the environment, it just might be possible to build a broad enough support base to get something done.

Who are these groups? Here are a few with which I’ve interacted over the years, many of which have tried somehow to engage the national historic preservation program and gone away shaking their heads at its petty fixations:

Indian tribes and other indigenous groups that aren’t formally recognized by the federal government;

Property owners who value the traditional use of their land;

Equestrians and outdoorspeople who value wild horses and burros on the federal estate;

Urban and suburban neighborhoods and rural villages that like their own ambience but don’t happen to meet the National Register’s criteria;

Traditional fisherpeople, hunters, trappers, whalers (consider shrimpers on the Gulf coast);

Gatherers of traditional medicinal plants or plant foods;

People struggling to preserve threatened languages and art forms;

Local communities – including but not limited to low-income and minority ones – that just want some respect from the government.

The interests of some of these groups conflict with one another from time to time, or with the interests of historic preservation’s Usual Suspects, but they all share some common ground – which they also share, to some extent, with the ill-defined grumbling masses that make up movements like the Tea Party. And the ground they share – respect for the traditional and familiar – is thickly grown with the brambles of distrust toward narrow disciplinary professionals. As Frank Fischer put it in his wise but ill-timed book Citizens, Experts, and the Environment (Duke University Press 2000:30):

Although open protests have tended to occur only sporadically, polls show a steady decline in the public’s confidence in, and respect for, professions…. Rather than a group of experts dedicated to the public good, professionals are widely perceived as a group more interested in increasing their own authority, power, and wealth.

If preservation’s Usual Suspects could only turn around and look outside their circle, their zone of comfortable interaction with one another, of reliance on crutches like the National Register, they might, with luck, find the critical mass necessary to make useful changes in the way cultural resources are managed in this country. Such engagement with the larger world would require teetering away from our crutches, though – the National Register, the Secretary’s Standards, professional expertise as the necessary prerequisite to being heard. I don’t anticipate that the Usual non-governmental Suspects are any more willing to do that than NPS or the ACHP would be.

If they can’t look out beyond their self-referential, self-reverential circle, if they can’t step away from their crutches, preservation’s Usual Suspects both outside government and within have, I think, no chance of doing anything but holding on, tenuously, to a gradually (or maybe rapidly) deteriorating status quo. I don’t think they have the guts or brains to get outside their comfort zone, so I expect that the Task Force – well-justified as its findings may be – will be just another exercise in preservation’s long history of hand-wringing and viewing with alarm.

NRC Nukes Environmental Review of Licensee Actions

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), as its name implies, regulates a range of activities carried out by private corporations making up the nuclear energy industry – including uranium mining and processing and the operation of nuclear power plants. For some decades, NRC has performed National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review on a wide range of licensee and applicant actions defined broadly as “construction.” In 2007, NRC decided that it didn’t really have the authority to regulate some such actions, and therefore couldn’t review their impacts under NEPA. So in order to stop doing such reviews, NRC redefined the word “construction” to exclude certain licensee and applicant activities. However, it didn’t at that time exclude the full range of activities that the nuclear energy wanted to escape review, so NRC staff went to work, with the industry, drafting further regulatory revisions extending the narrowed definition of “construction” to a wider range of actions. The new revisions were published in the Federal Register on July 27 (75 FR 43865-76); the deadline for comments is late tomorrow, November 29. I learned about the rulemaking awhile ago, but frankly dilly-dallied about reviewing it and drafting comments until this weekend. It struck me, upon reading the Federal Register notice, that while there might be a theoretical legal argument for NRC’s position in the matter, there were also good arguments against it that probably got ignored by the Bush-era NRC and Council on Environmental Quality back in 2007. In any event, it seems obvious that the regulatory change has (and had back in 2007) the potential for substantial impacts on the quality of the human environment in general and on historic properties and Indian tribal concerns in particular.

Following are my comments, just filed with NRC. If you’re interested in reviewing the rulemaking and commenting, you can access the documents and file comments via http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#searchResults?N=8099&Ne=11+8+8053+8098+8074+8066+8084+1&Ntk=All&Ntx=mode+matchall&Ntt=NRC-2010-0075. Be aware that the deadline for comments is Monday, November 29.

I write to comment on NRC’s proposal to revise 10 CFR Parts 30, 36, 39, 40, 51, 70, and 150, governing licenses, certifications, and approvals for material licensees, published in the Federal Register on July 27, 2010 (75 FR 43865-76).

1. Let me begin by saying that your system for (ostensibly) eliciting public comment on this rule change is so complex, counterintuitive, and generally obfuscatory that it renders public comment almost infeasible. Doubtless this was its intent, but if you want even to pretend an interest in what the public has to say, you might try providing a direct link to the rule on which you’re soliciting comments, rather than forcing the reader to search through multiple documents on general-purpose web pages.

2. Your proposed rule change, and the 2007 NRC findings upon which it is grounded, are based on a false premise – that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is “purely procedural.” This is manifestly not true. NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act, and although it has become the fashion throughout government in recent years to treat only the law’s procedural requirements without reference to its policy, the fact remains that Section 101 articulates general U.S. government policy regarding protection of the environment. Notably, Section 101(a) says it is the policy of the U.S. government, of which at last report NRC was a part, to use all practicable means to, among other things, create and maintain harmony between people and nature. Section 101(b) goes on to say that the government will use all practicable means to “improve and coordinate” federal plans and programs to achieve six broad environmental goals. Section 102 of NEPA directs that “to the fullest extent possible, …the policies, regulations, and public laws of the United States shall be interpreted and administered in accordance with the policies…” set forth in Section 101 (emphasis added)

It follows from this rather explicit legislative language that where an agency has the authority and ability to influence how the environment is managed and how the impacts of land use are controlled, it must use all the means practicably at its disposal, to the fullest extent possible, to ensure that management is sensitive to environmental concerns and that impacts are effectively considered and controlled.

Prior to 2007, albeit in a rather lackluster manner, NRC made efforts to be consistent with this congressional direction by regulating the entirety of an applicant's environmentally damaging work, and subjecting this work to review under NEPA Section 101(C). In 2007, as part of a national administration intent on undoing environmental controls regardless of legislative mandates and impacts on the public interest, NRC decided it ought not do that anymore with respect to some classes of applicant actions. Now you propose to extend this decision to ignore NEPA policy to the full range of applicant actions. Please explain how you justify this proposal with reference to the policy articulated in NEPA Section 101. Is it no longer practicable to regulate the entirety of an applicant’s environmentally damaging activities? No longer possible? If so, why?

3. This proposed rule change clearly has the potential for significant effects on the quality of the human environment. How have you analyzed this potential in accordance with the regulations of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ; 40 CFR 1500-1508)? Where can one find your assessment and findings? If you have not conducted such an analysis, what is your rationale for ignoring the seeming requirement for such an analysis found in the CEQ regulations?

4. Have you consulted with CEQ regarding this rule change, as required by 40 CFR 1507.3? What has CEQ had to say about it? Perhaps the 2007 CEQ said nothing about the 2007 NRC finding, but such silence, understood in the political context of the time, should not be taken as an indication of what the current CEQ would say.

5. Policies similar to NEPA’s are set forth in the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) with reference to impacts on historic properties. Please explain how you have addressed these policies in proposing this rule change.

6. This rule change clearly has the potential to cause adverse effects to historic properties, by removing federal oversight from a wide range of potentially destructive applicant activities. Section 106 of NHPA requires that federal agencies consider the effects of their actions on historic properties, and afford the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) a reasonable opportunity to comment on such actions. Please explain how you have done this, with reference to the ACHP’s regulations (36 CFR 800).

7. This rule change has the potential to have profound impacts on the interests of federally recognized Indian tribes in their cultural and natural heritage, including but not limited to ancestral burial places, living sites, and spiritual places as well as culturally important plants, animals, minerals, water, air, and landforms. Federal agencies are required by a range of laws, regulations, executive orders and case law grounded in treaties and in the U.S. constitution to consult with tribes on a government-to-government basis about agency actions potentially affecting tribal interests. Have you done this? Can you refer me to the record of such consultation?

Thank you for the opportunity to comment, and (prospectively) for answering my questions.

/s/ Thomas F. King

Cutting the Budget: One Small Suggestion

So, for better or worse, or indifferent, we have a Republican-dominated House of Representatives, and a lot of calls for reduction in the size and cost of the federal government. Without expecting that it will be attended to any more than it was before, I'm moved to re-post a piece I published here on January 21, 2009. I still think it would be a good idea.

TK

Cutting a Bit of Fat from the Federal Budget: Do Away With the National Register of Historic Places

Maintaining the National Register of Historic Places – self-described as the nation’s official list of significant historic sites, districts, buildings, structures, and objects – is one of the minor non-park-related duties of the National Park Service. It doesn’t cost a great deal of money in terms of direct costs – just the salaries of some Park Service employees and associated administrative expenses – but that money could certainly be more fruitfully used for other things, and eliminating the Register would also result in significant indirect savings by simplifying and streamlining federal environmental impact review.

The Register serves three functions, none of them critical to government operations or the welfare of the American people:

1. Owners of income-producing properties included in the Register get federal income tax credits for rehabilitating such properties in such a way as to extend their lives and maintain their significant architectural qualities. If there were not a register of some kind it would be impossible to determine which properties should and should not receive such benefits. But “a register” does not have to be a central national register, maintained at considerable expense by the federal government. State and local lists would do just as well. Most states and many local governments already maintain their own lists of places they want to preserve; why not support them rather than maintaining a redundant national list?
2. The information in the Register can be and is used for educational and touristic purposes, but again, state and local lists, as well as Indian tribal and Native Hawaiian lists, could serve these purposes just as well as or better than the National Register. So could databases maintained by federal land managing agencies.
3. Federal agencies are required by Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act to consider the effects of actions they plan – things they want to undertake or that others want to undertake with their assistance or permission – on places included in or eligible for the National Register. In my experience – and I’ve been working with Section 106 for over 40 years, inside and outside the federal government – tremendous amounts of time and money are wasted on argumentation over whether endangered places are eligible for inclusion in the Register. Not only is the time of highly paid specialists wasted in such arguments, but often important and expensive projects have to be delayed while they are conducted. The arguments almost never focus on serious questions about the cultural, historical, or architectural significance of such places; they almost always involve differing interpretations or understandings of the technical criteria for eligibility issued by the National Park Service. I believe we would have a much stronger, more efficient, more sensible procedure for managing federal impacts on historic places if we focused Section 106 review on whatever people concerned about a given proposed project thought was historically, culturally, or architecturally significant in the affected environment – always with the understanding that, as today, if agreement couldn’t be reached about how to deal with a project’s impacts, the responsible agency could get the recommendations of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (or some equivalent body) and make its final decision about whether to go forward with the impacts or not. With such a system, of course, we would not need a National Register, and we would save the federal, state, local, and private money that goes into arguing over eligibilty for it.

We actually do not “need” a National Register today – it’s simply something that the National Historic Preservation Act created back in 1966 and we’ve gotten used to and stuck with. The Register today serves only as a distraction from the real work of preserving the heritage of the nation, its regions, states, tribes, and groups. It imposes upon us the obnoxious perception that the Secretary of the Interior, through the National Park Service, has to verify what is historically, culturally, and architecturally significant. Why is the Secretary qualified to do this, particularly with regard to what, say, the people of Gallup, New Mexico or Nyack, New York may think is part of their heritage? And why should the Secretary spend even a small chunk of his budget making decisions about such things? Why not let the people decide -- and save a bit of money, simplify government, and improve management of the environment in the process?

Screen Test: A Bit of Archaeology

Writing a short paper at Mike Moratto's request on my archaeological mentor, the late and considerably lamented A.E. Treganza, I was reminded of the difficulty Trig had making the transition to the routine use of screens (sieves, as they’re called in some other venues); he, like others of his generation (the first generation of California archaeologists) had always been a shovel-and-trowel man.

It occurred to me that the issue – why Trig didn’t much like screens – might have had to do with his artistic, organic approach to archaeology; he really made himself at one with the site, and screening can’t help but remove the archaeologist from the site – either by putting him or her up on the backdirt pile shaking, or by leaving him or her down in the pit (oops – unit – that was another transition Trig had trouble with) relying on the screener to find the goods. The practice fragments, segments, partitions the excavation experience.

Like everyone else doing archaeology in the U.S., over the last 50 years I’ve gotten used to routine screening, but recently on Nikumaroro in Kiribati, pursuing Amelia Earhart, I had to pretty much eschew screens, and the results were interesting. We were stripping a large area of the site, going down only 10 cm. (because that’s about as deep as we ever find anything there), and doing it all by trowel. We had seven 2-meter wide lanes, with two excavators in each; they simply crawled, sprawled, along troweling and closely examining what appeared in front of them.

Interesting result: LOTS more tiny things found than we’d ever found in previous seasons screening. I think it was because the people were right down there with their faces in the excavation, with everything right in front of them, and they knew that THEY were the ones who had to find whatever there was to find, in situ. And because, given the particular character of the site – contained in the coral-rubble surge ridge on the windward side of an atoll – out-of-place objects were more evident in situ against the broken coral than they would have been if relocated into a screen full of the same rubble.

The Seven Site on Nikumaroro is a lot different from almost any site in the U.S., and I’m not advocating a wholesale abandonment of screens – just noting that there are times and places where, perhaps, they get in the way.

Unrelated screen/sieve note: I’ve sometimes wondered why British and Commonwealth archaeologists seem always to use dorky little circular sieves instead of the nice, efficient, rectangular rockers we prefer in the U.S.. Walking through the Spice Market in downtown Istanbul earlier this month, I came upon the answer – great heaping piles of the things, in every gauge, readily available for sale. Doubtless an implement of ancient and honorable parentage in the Middle East, picked up by the likes of Petrie and Wooley and a part of the standard tool kit ever since.

Playing the "Plus" in CRM Plus: Why Vote Democratic

I called this blog "CRM Plus" to give myself the space to write about things other than "cultural resource management," but haven't heretofore taken advantage of that flexibility. Now I will. I recently posted a note on Facebook asking anyone who was even thinking of voting Republican in the forthcoming election to give me the chance to talk them out of it. Only one person did so; I'll not reveal his or her identity; suffice to say that he or she is a law enforcement professional. Below, for whatever interest it may have for any of my faithful (or other) readers, is what I sent him or her.

Since I did my Facebook posting inviting anyone thinking of voting Republican to give me a chance to talk them out of it, and you (and only you) took me up on it, I guess the ball’s in my court and I’d better put up. Let’s see…..

Let’s start with something you and I discussed not long ago – immigration. You told me a story about stopping a vanload of obvious illegal immigrants en route to a distribution point, and being unable to do anything about it because dealing with them was reserved to the feds. That convinced me that there was justification in Arizona’s attempt to empower/require its police force to deal with illegals. Whether it’s constitutional for the state to do so is another matter, but I think we agree that something needs to be done, and that the federal government hasn’t yet done much. OK; I’ll also volunteer that I think one of the few smart things G.W. Bush proposed as president was an immigration policy including a guest worker program. But the Republicans never supported that, and now can’t propose anything but higher walls and more firepower along the border. That’s not going to do the job; the Romans and the Chinese and the French all learned that walls and troops along their borders don’t stop folks who really want to get in. We ought to profit from their education.

So what would work? I think it’s painfully obvious. Why are people risking and often losing their lives crossing the deserts to work here? Two related reasons. First, there are too many of them in their home countries – too many mouths to feed. Second, there aren’t enough jobs at home to make it feasible to feed everybody. How to fix this? Support population control and economic development in the countries from which illegal immigrants come. Do Democrats, on the whole, support such things? Yes. Do Republicans do so? Hell no; Republicans consistently want to cut foreign aid and prohibit our aid agencies from even talking to people about family planning.

Before you even say it, I know that promoting economic development and family planning in other countries isn’t going to solve the illegal immigration problem quickly; it’s a long-term strategy. In the meantime we need things like guest worker programs and probably amnesty for people already here, and some way for police forces not to have their hands tied in dealing with illegal immigrants. But those are all band-aids. We ought to be looking for long-term solutions as well as doing the best short-term fixes we can. At least some Democrats are willing to consider such things; Republicans have forbidden themselves even to contemplate them.

Let’s talk about drugs. Here again I think there are some obvious ways to bring drug abuse and drug-related crime under control. We ought to learn the lesson of Prohibition; decriminalize the use of at least the common “recreational” drugs, regulate their use the way we regulate the use of alcohol, and tax it. Undercut the cartels, stop stuffing the jails with relatively inoffensive “criminals,” bring in some revenue. Is this a perfect solution? Of course not, but it makes a whole lot more sense than the utterly mad arrangement we have now. Is it at least possible that Democrats would entertain such ideas? Yes. Republicans? Individual Republicans, sure, but as a body? Nope; the only thing the Republican Party can offer is to build more jails, contract with questionable private firms to run them, and lock lots more people up.

Then there’s the economy. It wasn’t really that long ago that the federal budget was showing a surplus, and the national debt was shrinking. That was an achievement of the Clinton administration, fighting back from years of tax cuts for the rich during the Reagan and Bush Senior years. Eight years of Bush Junior, more tax cuts, profligate spending, and blind deregulation of Wall Street, and the Obama administration comes in faced by a staggering debt, two wars to fight, and a meltdown of the stock market, housing market, and practically every other market around. They’ve had less than two years to fix all this and are making progress. Have they done everything right? Certainly not; whoever does? But they’ve tried, and they’ve had some success. What have the Republicans done? Sniped, whined, and tried – effectively, it sadly appears – to convince the electorate that our economic distress is Obama’s problem, that things would be better if we just cut upper-tier taxes some more.

How about health care? Is there some reason the World Health Organization ranks the U.S. health care system #37 in the world (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVgOl3cETb4)? Other than that they’re all internationalist commies? Maybe there’s a problem? Maybe we should try to fix it? Again, the bill passed last year may not be the best approach in the world (I don’t think it was; I’d like to see single-payer), but it was what could be done, an exercise of the art of the possible. What would the Republicans prefer? Maybe a nice comfortable slip to number 47, as long as the upper crust can afford privileged treatment.

I could go on and on, but let me wind up with a subject close to my heart – the environment, impact assessment, and regulation. I’m frankly mad as hell at the way the Obama administration has dealt with the environment. They’ve gotten railroaded into backing every cockamamie “green energy” scheme that’s come along, and as a result are bending the environmental impact assessment laws into pretzels to expedite putting up solar fields and wind farms – in the process screwing over some of the most pristine environments on the continent. And even when confronted with the Deepwater Horizon disaster they couldn’t be moved to pursue ways to fix the obvious flaws in the impact assessment and regulatory regime in anything like a systematic way. They’ve renamed agencies and set up study commissions instead. But we’ve hardly seen the Republicans doing better – remember the notion that we should all apologize to BP for being so mean to them?

OK, enough. I think it’s a no-brainer; the Democrats are far, far from perfect, but the Republicans, to be charitable, are nuts. If they’re not nuts, there’s nothing I can say about them that wouldn’t be libelous.

HR 5282 Needs Support in the U.S. Senate

HR 5282 would provide long-term support to the Veterans Curation Project, a Corps of Engineers project that trains wounded veterans in curation skills and helps them find work and/or encourages them to continue/resume their education. It addresses two needs -- the need for such veterans to develop marketable and intellectually stimulating skills, and the need to get federal and other archaeological/archival collections properly cared for. It's been in existence for a couple of years and already it's highly successful, with a high percentage of its graduates finding work and/or enrolling in college. Informal interviews with participants even suggests that the work may have direct therapeutic effects in handling PTSD. But the Corps money will run out soon. HR 5282 would provide longer-term funding, perhaps long enough to enable the program to become self-supporting.

HR 5282 has passed the House, but has no sponsors at all in the Senate. I've urged Maryland's Senators Mikulski and Cardin to become its champions in the Senate, and I hope they will, but anyone who's concerned about wounded veterans and/or the care of collections ought to consider asking their Senators to do the same.

For the text of the bill and its current status, see http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c111:4:./temp/~c111RV8i2E::

Apologies to New Orleans

My good friend Chris Goodwin has quite properly taken me to task for the flip comment about New Orleans in my last post. Chris emphasizes the city's and region's overwhelming cultural, historical, and economic importance and very justly criticizes me for slandering it by suggesting that it's a lost cause. He argues that New Orleans is coming back and will be a stronger city than ever in the wake of its recent traumas.

I do apologize for any offense. My comment was a thoughtless one. It was driven by my unhappy belief that in the long -- and maybe not very long -- run we are not going to be able to do anything about global warming and the sea level rise that goes with it, so low-lying cities like New Orleans (to say nothing of the Pacific atolls to which I have attachments not unlike those Chris feels toward the Big Easy) are doomed. I'm not happy about that; I don't think it's a good thing, but I think it's a bullet we are probably going to have to bite and ought to be planning for. But for the sake of those whose roots or hearts lie in the bayous, along with the people of the atolls, San Francisco, Miami and Hong Kong, among many, many other places, I hope I'm wrong. Thanks, Chris.