b'C H A P T E R F I VEIt had absorbed almost seven years to conceive and rear the management plan to maturity, from the first, hesitant steps in 1987, to the signing ceremony in August 94. Why such a long time? To Kurt Hellfach, it was because our plan was the cutting edge. We were the first town, the first harbor (other than Boston) to go through that dreadful procedure. In many ways, the Office of Coastal Zone Management didnt know how to review the process. They were groping along as we went along.Without question, the designers had to work their way through unfamiliar and possibly treacherous waters. Happily, they were able to achieve their most important objective. In Kurt Hellfachs words, The most overarching part of the plan was maintaining a balanced use of Stage Harbor, a balance among competing interests. If we hadnt watched out, all of the harbor would have become a mooring basin, like Marblehead. We had a very strong interest in maintaining the outstanding shellfishing in Stage Harbor.As to whether the overall drafting process was an unflawed success, the judgment would seem to be: not quite. The key man leading the Waterways Committee through the crucial years, Dick Miller, decided that instead of hiring a consulting firm, we should have hired a full-time person, a processor, to keep the initiatives going and then farm out the science. Management of the Stage Harbor concepts evolution was a little bit too loose. (There was) never a clear line. No czar .This was cumbersome.One of FCWs most-engaged volunteers, Debby Ecker, would concur. In her Boston experience as a computer-sawy associate commissioner in the Commonwealths Tax Department, she had learned more than many about process. The consultants really let us down on the report, she recalls, and charged an arm and a leg. When the time came to turn that document into a professional submission, Mrs. Ecker had to go up on deck in foul-weather gear and start hauling fish. My contribution, she says, was to try to get the report to look decent, which I dont think it does to this day. They sent me the disks and I physically reformatted it, putting in capitals, and so on. She spent hundreds of hours on that step, then took the result to the consultants and said, You really should go through this before it is completed. They were just glowering and furious.Still, the plan passed muster, and FCW had been a major factor, contributing time, dollars, and persistence, hanging in until the official signatures were on the line. To the first chairman of the Waterways Committee, Richard Hiscock, FCW had been almost pivotal in giving Chatham proper harbor management.75'