Herring River Restoration Project

The 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU III) between the town of Wellfleet and the National Park Service defines the governance of the Herring River Restoration Project. It specifies that the Herring River Executive Council is responsible for making all substantive decisions about the project. Its members are "the Wellfleet Town Administrator and two members of the Wellfleet Select Board … [or their designees and the] Superintendent of the Cape Cod National Seashore or his/her designee, and one additional CCNS designee."

The Executive Council is largely made up of transients. Wellfleet began looking for a new administrator at the end of 2023 to replace the one who resigned after less than 19 months on the job. His predecessor served on the council for only 3 years. The Cape Cod National Seashore has had three superintendents since the executive council's inception. No member who attended the first meeting in 2017 remains on the council today.

Despite its purported responsibility "for making all substantive decisions about the project," the executive council's role appears to be primarily ceremonial. Membership does not require members to have the technical knowledge required to do the job. Instead, it is supposed to rely on advice from technical experts, but minutes of its meetings are mostly progress reports.

The number of council meetings held annually supports the notion that the council's role is largely ceremonial. While eight meetings were held in 2020, the number of annual meetings thereafter was halved to four. There is no evidence that the council increased its activity during the critical period leading up to the project's official launch in January 2023.