Hey fellow Husker, welcome to the forum! I love your fishery goals, SMB are amazing and a lot of fun to manage.
I manage several fisheries in NE and many feature cool water species [SMB, HSB, YP, WE] and am happy to help. I am also the only SMB hatchery in NE so can provide some insight there, too. Feel free to reach out anytime - too much to relate here. HBCP can work as they do in my fishery, but it requires pretty dense predator populations, which provides yet another management challenge.