Administrative
The Willapa bay Fisheries Enhancement Group is a volunteer/community based organization that has been doing salmon recovery for 16 years. We became a non-profit 501 (c)(3) corporation in 1991. We are one of 14 Regional Enhancement Groups in Washington State created by the state legislators for community based salmon recovery. We have a board of Directors, and a small part time staff.
Our management philosophy is to maximize our funds to accomplish on the ground habitat projects, salmon enhancement (nutrient and salmon egg planting) projects, community outreach/education, and volunteer involvement are our key focus areas. Our manager volunteers the majority his time for in-kind matching, and we utilize our funds from Washington State fishing license sales for matching or leverage for other funds. Our total administrative costs in 2002 were 4.7% of our annual budget.
we have maintained the leverage ratio of 9.0 for the last four years. This year we spent $63,911 of our Regional Enhancement funds, which leveraged an additional $565,372, bringing the total leveraged funding to $2,699,268. Our administrative expenses vary between 3.4 to 7.5%. Our grant request for next year comes to a total of $657,773. Our many volunteers contributed over 2,200 hours, or $100,000 during 2002.
Because we are community based we have many projects that are recommended to us for accomplishment each year. We are very selective in our projects. They need to be consistent and supportive of our Strategic Plan, must have a direct benefit to salmon, and landowners support are necessary conditions. Before any habitat project is submitted for funding we accomplish pre-planning and engineering to assure the project benefit salmon and are cost effective. All our funded projects receive a baseline monitoring followed by a minimum of three years monitoring. We have developed a monitoring protocol which is used for our monitoring. We also have an ongoing stewardship program to follow our projects.