Steve Brandt:  Looking Forward

Stephen Brandt, program director

(Full PowerPoint presentation now available here).

Key points:

National program level:

NOAA Climate Service - a new line office with elements from OAR (NOAA Research). Sea Grant remains in OAR for the time being. Climate Service represents new opportunities for Sea Grant – in funding, in collaboration, in outreach. It remains to be seen how it will affect OAR/Sea Grantfunding and budget priorities.

Planning, Implementation, Evaluation (PIE) – We’ve spent a lot of time and effort developing our strategic plan. We will be evaluated against our strategic plan and our implementation plan, and how well we do compared to what we said we could do.

More attention will be paid to measures of our social impact. “If you put a milestone in your plan – ‘I’m going to double the number of communities that do thus-and-such’ – we’ll be evaluated based on whether you achieve that.”

All program activities are included – in an integrated manner.

Performance reviews: Anual, 4-year site reviews and 4-year performance reviews (which incorporate the annual reviews).

“If we’re successful we will get a rating and that leads to money.” But “success ” means not only reaching our milestones, but exceeding them.

The national office expects that any budget increase the program gets will go into the merit pool, and be divided among highest-performing programs. But even if there is no federal budget increase, a high rating in the national review reflects well on us with the university, which bases its own assessment of OSG on our national reviews.

There’s also value in being able to demonstrate that what we do is of measurable value to the state.

The review process is far less burdensome to the programs now, too.  We recently had our first annual review from Jim Murray [see presentation], and it went “extremely well.”

Site visit is Oct. 5-6, 2010. Just 1.5 days, probably entirely on campus, and they’ll meet only with management team, OSU officials, etc. The intent is to look at our management and organization, stakeholder engagement and collaboration with Sea Grant and other partners.

Statewide

• Steve  plans meetings with other institutions
• Also planning another coastal trip March 20-28
• Nearshore Research Task Force
  Established by state law to address needs for coordinated and trusted nearshore research in Oregon.  Recomendations due to the legislature by Aug.1.  Steve was elected chair. They’ve written two proposals and received funding to operate workshops and gather information.  If it bears fruit, this could provide a new way to integrate marine science into policy, management, education and outreach – and new funding mechanisms.

OSU:

OSU Marine Council -

• Establishing action coordination teams to address specific marine science issues, from the NOAA Fleet relocation to identifying emerging action issues.
• Provides a single mechanism for getting involved in the university’s approaches to marine science.

Oregon Sea Grant

• Strategic and Implementation plans: “This is not just a planning exercise. This is what we’re going to do.”
• New staff directory
• ODFW fellows interviews just completed
• Oregon Sea Grant Summer Scholars – undergrad fellows to be placed in resource management agencies.
• Three vacancies on Advisory Council; Steve is interviewing people; feel free to submit names by the end of March. We’re looking in particular for business, tribal, new geographic areas, etc.
• New organization structure – Jay’s position will be split into two posts – a fulltime Sea Grant Extension leader and a fulltime Associate Director for Program Development (not yet funded).
• OSG can make a strong case to continue our program structure as it is, even in the face of institutional discussions about program mergers and consolidation .
• Next RFP begins in November and we need to decide what areas of research to emphasize.
• New policy on external funding: “Sea Grant Faculty are encouraged to seek external funding to enhance their professional development, scholarly activities, and promote the goals of Oregon Sea Grant and OSU. Senior personel working on external projects will receive 50% of the salary brought by the project on an accrued basis. Accruals will be distributed in individual operating budgets at the beginning of each fiscal year.” The returned money can be spent to hire student assistants, etc.

We’ll be live-blogging Oregon Sea Grant’s Feb. 16-17 all-hands meeting, both as a proof-of-concept for real-time, on-the-spot event reporting, and to provide an archive of key information and presentations from the meeting.

• Here’s the final meeting agenda (.pdf format)
• Here’s how to get to the Salbasgeon Suites