PART V. DEVELOPMENT OF THE COMPREHENSIVE 

 NATIONAL PROGRAM 



Introduction 



As decreed by the Congress in section 5g of the act : 



The report shall include * * * recommendations for a comprehensive national 

 program for the * * * development of estuaries * * * and the respective re- 

 sponsibilities which should be assumed by Federal, State, and local governments 

 and by public and private interests. 



The recommendations are included in part III of this report, and 

 the following portion, part V, contains the background material for 

 the recommendations plus descriptions of the various governmental 

 responsibilities. 



The rationale for this development is as follows. To provide a basis 

 for the developing these recommendations and defining responsibil- 

 ities, a volume of material was amassed on the views, suggestions, pro- 

 grams, and legislative authorities of all sectors of the national conimu- 

 nity — Federal, State, and local governments and public and private 

 interests. This background information was obtained through very 

 diligent solicitations of all these sectors. The resulting material con- 

 sisted of reports, correspondence, and personal communications which 

 were analyzed and summarized to produce relatively brief overviews. 

 The source information used to produce the overviews is being re- 

 tained separately from this report for future reference and updating. 



These overviews, which are quite brief considering the original 

 mass of information, are presented as the following chapters of this 

 part of the report. The order in which they are presented is essentially 

 the same as that used in the wording of the act, that is, chapter 1 is the 

 Federal agencies; chapter 2, the "State" agencies; chapter 3, the local 

 governments; chapter 4, the compact (or interstate) agencies; and 

 chapter 5, the public and private interests. These overviews were re- 

 lated to those of other marine resource studies (chapter 6) and then 

 related to specific geographic areas to present a concrete overall view 

 (chapter 7) and finally summarized in the form of conclusions (chap- 

 ter 8). In turn chapter 8 provides the skeletal outline for the de- 

 velopment of the recommendations enumerated in part III of this 

 report, and chapter 9 provides suggested guidelines for a management 

 statute. 



(343) 



42-847 O — 7C 



