As a part of the Refuge Improvement Act, Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge has to complete a
Comprehensive Conservation Plan, also known as a CCP.
It’s a long range planning document and in that plan, we’re supposed to look down
the road at what management opportunities and issues we’ll face for the next 15 years.
That’s what we’re doing here today.
We have wildlife issues that we’ll face.
We have rising sea level and climate change issues that we’ll face.
And although we don’t know all the answers to those issues, we have to address them and
we have to talk about them with the American public.
As a part of the CCP process, Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge has developed four
draft alternatives before completing their final document.
We’ve developed four based upon the feedback that we’ve received from our previous public
meetings.
So, we have a no-action alternative, status quo, just keep doing what we’re doing based
upon the last plan that we put together in 1992.
We have Plan B, which many perceive to be good for people, good for wildlife.
There’s Plan C, which puts a major emphasis on letting the natural process take its course
upon the island and there’s Plan D where we really focus on the mission, focusing a
lot of our management on the threatened and endangered species, which we’re beholding
to protect.
Public access on the refuge is the basis for the town of Chincoteague’s economy and some
of the proposed alternatives have raised concern in the local community, including the size
of the pony herd.
The four draft alternatives look at pony management in different ways.
Alternative A: nothing changes.
Absolutely nothing changes, still the same pony population, still the same management
strategy.
When we get to Alternative B, that’s when we start doing exciting things with the ponies.
We actually not only want to maintain the current population the way it is but we also
want to work with the Volunteer Fire Department to maybe use the ponies to help us with our
management within the impoundments.
That’s really exciting- we’ve not tried that before.
Like Alternatives A and B, Alternative C maintains the current pony population as long as the
land base allows for safe pony management.
Alternative D is the only alternative that proposes the number of ponies on the refuge
over the next 15 years.
Because Chincoteague is a coastal community, the threat of sea level rise affects how the
refuge will plan for beach access and parking.
We want to reassure the American public that the Fish and Wildlife Service plans to have
a recreational beach.
We’ve never in any of our draft alternatives or any of the options that we’ve laid out
have we said that we are going to remove the recreational beach from the American public
or take it away.
Instead, we support it and we’d like to see that use continue.
The issue that we face is where will we park people?
That’s the major contention right now.
Over the last fifty years, the parking area on the beach has been diminishing due to natural
erosion.
Where this was good plan for fifty years, it’s now time to start making plans for
the next fifty years.
Alternatives B and D propose moving the beach and parking north ahead of changing conditions
while maintaining habitat for migratory birds and waterfowl.
It was very important and it was easy to see through using GIS and our other mapping capabilities
of locating that one mile segment of beach that the birds are basically not using and
that turned out to be the areas between C-dike and D-dike.
We haven’t made any decision of which way we’re going.
We’ve just laid out alternatives, draft alternatives to get the public’s reaction.