Timeline for marine monument visitors center pushed

A firm timeline is being pushed for a Marianas Trench Marine National Monument Visitors Center, five years after the monument was established in 2009.

“Without establishing a timeline, you will not be able to know how you’re going to go from point A to point Z,” said Manny Pangelinan, Marianas Trench Monument Advisory Council member as well as acting secretary of the Department of Land and Natural Resources.

He said he would be writing to the other advisory council to recommend that the timeline be established.

Pangelinan wants the timeline to articulate distinct phases for completion of the center.

As of now, as they are still drawing on public comments to add to their own initial recommendations for a center, he said the council does not yet have a conceptual design and “there is still much to be done” in deciding where a visitors center would be.

He said it must be decided first where it will be set, then permitting for the land must be done, and then funding must be looked for.

The lack of a timeline, among other things, was one issue brought up during discussion Wednesday night at a public meeting hosted by the council.

Though in its “very early stages,” Pangelinan called the public meeting a step forward.

“We heard loud and clear last night that the people demands a timeline,” he said.

However, a date for an established timeline could not yet be given, according to him.

Next year around March, a draft management plan for MTMN should be ready, according to both Susan White, National Wildlife Refuge Complex and National Marine Monuments superintendent for U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and Heidi Hirsch, natural resource management specialist for NOAA’s National Marine Monument program.

More public comments would be invited regionally again around that time, according to White.

As for the public meetings ongoing in the CNMI, Hirsch described them as “very successful.”

She is encouraged that the “wheels are in motion” to finally provide a visitors center to the islands, noting the length of years it has taken to do so.

“Our goal was to invite [people] to the decision-making process and to know what their goals and desires are,” she said.

One recommendation, noted both by Hirsch and Pangelinan in interviews, was one man’s suggestion of moving forward incrementally, establishing an engineering design and seeking seed money, and moving on from there.

Last Wednesday’s discussion was led by Pangelinan and John Parks, owner of Marine Management Solutions, with audience comments written on a bulletin, as well as sticky-notes being handed to participants to gather answers for questions like where the visitors center should be built, who should manage the center and how may it be funded.