I think there are two things. The one thing I mentioned was conservation and stewardship initiatives to incent farmers to do the right thing. Sometimes this isn't necessarily on the drainage ditches; it's on water courses that are through their farms.
On the drainage ditch maintenance thing, you have to recognize these were man-made facilities to start with. Before they were even put there, there was no fish habitat. They were just trying to get rid of that extra water.
There has to be an understanding that as part of that cycle, they do have to be cleaned out. If you look at it from a pragmatic point of view, you see that you may be destroying one habitat here, but what you're actually doing is creating new habitat for several years down the road. It's almost like a rotation.
I would suggest this goes back to the regional plan. If you look at the regional plans for drain maintenance, you see that drain maintenance should be staggered so you're not all in one place at one time.
The other thing you look at is where that drain interacts with the natural water course. That's likely the area of most risk. With that, when taking a look at developing best management practices for dealing with that drain on the maintenance, it would make more sense to take a look at a number of drains, and say these are the types of things that need to be done rather than have to go through a complex set of approvals and engineering designs for every individual drain, because all that does is adds costs to the system. It really doesn't address the risk.
If you look at the risk where they interact, understand there's going to have to be some maintenance damage done while you're doing those drains, but see if you can get a unified approach to do it that isn't based on every drain having to have an individual design, with all the inherent engineering. It would cut the cost and it would still meet the concerns of dealing with any risk to fish habitat.