Our deliberations were done in a background where we knew that regulatory impact assessment statements were going to be made any time a regulation, such as a listing or a regulation under critical habitat identification off a federal land, etc., was going to be made. So we didn't feel that we should make any strong statements about how those should be done, except that they should be clear. The science in them should be clear, and they should be peer reviewed, etc., so that people can see how those decisions were made. We remained agnostic as to what the ideal might be.
When the law was being drafted, some of us who were also involved in reading those drafts and commenting on them in the early 1990s thought the action plan was the time when those hard decisions would be made, and that the recovery strategy would be, in a sense, blind to how it was actually going to be done on the ground. But when we realized, even at the listing stage, that a RIAS was going to be performed and that socio-economics was simply there, we realized that at the very least we wanted that to be as transparent and as clear and consistent as possible.