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related activities on the Tongass. 



As the tourist industry has grown, we have experienced explosive 

 growth in the number of persons seeking permission to carry out 

 tourist related business activities on the Tongass. Frankly, the 

 growth in requests has far outrun our expectations and far outrun 

 the appropriations we receive to evaluate and manage the 

 permits. We intend to do better. We have established a task 

 team to review the entire permit process to identify 

 administrative efficiencies, to speed it up, and to make it more 

 convenient for the public — in short, to re-engineer the entire 

 permit process. 



Also, we have committed to an improved interagency partnership so 

 that the public will be subjected to less bureaucracy and 

 improved response to their applications. 



5. Greater efficiency with fewer people and tighter budgets. 



We are just completing a process to reorganize and downsize the 

 Regional Office in Juneau in order to reduce administrative costs 

 and get more money to on-the-ground programs throughout Southeast 

 Alaska. In the coming years we expect to reexamine work 

 processes at all levels of our organization to ensure that we are 

 properly configured for the workload and budgetary challenges 

 that we think are coming in the balance of this century and the 

 opening of the next. We have appointed a special task team to 



