[Sustain] Staying Grounded on Water Issues (from NM)

[Martin Zehr]

This is a post from an active participant in the Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly (in Albuquerque, NM) who lives now in Glen Park. The discussion raises the issues that only a party that runs candidates and builds support for its own Platform can address. The political solutions lie in creating new forms of adaptive governance and establishing formalized roles for Green representation as urban water users with a particular agenda on sustainability. This comes through the governing entities such as the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission  http://www.ci.sf.ca.us/site/frame.asp?u=http://www.sfwater.org/  , the Citizens' Advisory Commission and the Sustainability Plan. It also comes by sitting down with state legislators who consistently support sustainability and developing common strategies and legislation that can empower the local entities to implement significant changes.

Mato Ska
GPSF

Dear Water Assembly List Members,


For what it may be worth, here are some thoughts on Kay Matthews’ La Jicarita News editorial. She states, toward the bottom, “The ISC has made it abundantly clear that it doesn't want implementation as part of the regional plans and doesn't want public welfare to apply to a water management strategy that encourages water transfers from agricultural lands to urban areas.” I have great respect for Kay, and understand her frustration, but I don’t believe that’s generally true. However, that statement may apply to the Taos plan, but not because the Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) is “in bed” with development interests. Above all, I think state water policy administrators are seeking to avoid conflict, and especially the litigation of competing claims on a scarce resource, which they’re anxious not to get in the middle of. (They lack data, don’t have the resources, etc.) Taos region politicians probably are getting pressured by development and other parochial interests, and they in turn are leaning on the state, which is trying to find a way out by taking the position that though the stakeholders have legitimately had their input, actual implementation of the plan should be the responsibility of local elected officials.


I think that originally, the Regional Water Plan (RWP) process was attractive to the bureaucracy because it seemed to be a way of letting heterogeneous local interests work through the issues and come to some reasonable conclusions about policies that could get buy-in at a sub-state level. If there really was consensus, the state could then support a local “public welfare”-based policy in approving or denying a transfer. (This is what the State Engineer meant when he told the Dialogue at the 2004 annual statewide meeting that he would be “guided” by regional definitions of public welfare.) Problems arose, however, because the mechanisms used to aggregate the interests of a region (itself a pretty fuzzy concept – because the Public Welfare statement had to be pretty vague and overly generalized to get wide support) really had no institutional legitimacy. A RWP committee or council could gather the input, and even approve a plan, but it would take actors with jurisdiction carry it out. So the “open” planning system gets replaced by a “closed” implementation system.


The answer to this, I think, is not to throw up our hands and ask “Why did we even bother?”” Instead, we somehow need to work on making those planning systems more robust, and work toward “institutionalizing” a citizen-based plan implementation oversight function in every region. The Taos planners took it farther than any other region (to my knowledge), but haven’t yet had the political clout to make it stick. If lawmakers would provide a legal framework recognizing ongoing regional planning organizations, giving them even advisory review authority, and providing resources for them to operate, I believe the ISC would be far less likely to cave to special interests (if that is indeed what happened). If the RWPs are being updated around the state beginning this year, now would be the time to put a bug in legislators’ ears about making these regional mechanisms better and stronger. Done right, this could transform the water policy process. The New Mexico Water Dialogue is in an early stage of working on a template for updating RWPs, and in the spirit of openness would welcome suggestions. To see working documents for this project, please visit http://nmwaterdialogue.org/rwp_update_template.html.


Lynn and Elizabeth, don’t give up now! ¡Sί se puede! Best wishes,


John


John R Brown



________________________________



From: mailadmin at waterassembly.org [mailto:mailadmin at waterassembly.org] On Behalf Of eachestnut at aol.com
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 2:50 PM
To: mrgwa at waterassembly.org
Subject: Re: (MRGWA) true colors revealed


Question: re the Matthews Editorial: why the hell is anyone spending ANY time on the



Regional Water Plans if ISC intends to completely ignore and or circumvent them?



Effective PUBLICITY regarding this turn of Events??? Anyone? Elizabeth Chestnut


-----Original Message-----
From: Lynn Montgomery 
To: MRGWA 
Sent: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 9:01 am
Subject: (MRGWA) true colors revealed



http://lajicarita.org/currentissue.htm#editorial

Editorial: Taos Regional Water Plan Hijacked by the Powers That Be

By Kay Matthews



We often use the expression "not at the table" to indicate that someone's input was not represented in a process, whether by intention or omission. Well, at the March 7 meeting of the Taos Regional Water Plan, members of the Public Welfare Committee (PWC), who drafted the Public Welfare Statement (PWS) and Implementation Program, were designated the "Stakeholders" and literally were "not at the table": we were consigned to the audience while all the "Decision Makers" were physically there. The Decision Makers, or Taos Region elected officials, included all the municipalities, water districts, and Abeyta adjudication parties who have objected to the Public Welfare Implementation Program because they want to buy and sell water rights on the open market with no oversight.



The meeting was orchestrated by the Interstate Stream Commission and facilitated by Rosemary Romero as the second of two supposed "mediation" sessions to try reach consensus on the plan. But at the first meeting, the Implementation Program was taken "off the table" at the behest of the Decision Makers. Members of the PWC were led to believe that at the subsequent March 7 meeting participants would then work on drafting some kind of language to address implementation.



As a member of the Taos Regional Water Plan steering committee and the PWC, I dropped out of the negotiation process several months ago (the PWC met many times throughout the fall with the Decision Makers and drafted 17 versions of the PWS and Implementation Program to try to make it more inclusive of their demands) when I saw where we were headed. I believe we were lending undeserved credibility to their complaints by agreeing to changes to a document that had been drafted from the bottom up by stakeholders from around the Taos Region. These stakeholders represented unincorporated communities, environmental organizations, acequias, mutual domestics, and other water users who met for over two years, as volunteers, to draft the plan, and who came to public meetings across the region to help devise critical strategies for the plan, which included keeping water in its area of origin. They supported the creation of an oversight committee to look at all transfers both within and from the region, and based on the public welfare criteria we had developed, including cultural protection, agrarian character, watershed health, and long-term economic development, make an informed recommendation to the Office of the State Engineer as to whether the transfer was in the public interest. Many, if not most, of the Decision Makers, while designated members of the steering committee, seldom attended the Water Plan meetings. Only when we were ready to submit the plan to the ISC for approval did they decide to start attending meetings and object that they had "been left out of the process."



I went to the second mediation meeting to cover it for La Jicarita News, and even I was surprised by the blatant maneuvering of the ISC. Romero made it clear that only the Decision Makers were going to address implementation, and Stakeholders were not to participate. When several PWC members objected to the undemocratic way the meeting was being run, they were told that the steering committee and PWC had done their job and were no longer part of the process. It was time for the Decision Makers to draft an implementation component for the plan.



To his credit, County Commissioner Nick Jaramillo (the County is the only Decision Maker that approved the Implementation Program) objected to the process of excluding the committee members. He pointed out that Simeon Herskovits, the member of the PWC who has been responsible for drafting the many versions of the PWS, was unable to attend the previous meeting (committee members had requested that the date of that meeting be changed because of Simeon's absence but were ignored) and was told he would be able to submit some changes, recommended by the PWC, to the PWS. Jaramillo stated that despite this attempt by the municipalities to protect their interests, the County will move forward to do what is best for all its constituents.



The Decision Makers then proceeded to spend the rest of the meeting drafting an implementation program that focused on setting up an "educational and information respository," which is all fine and dandy except that this Taos Regional Water Plan is not what the public said it wanted. The ISC has made it abundantly clear that it doesn't want implementation as part of the regional plans and doesn't want public welfare to apply to a water management strategy that encourages water transfers from agricultural lands to urban areas. Until growth and development are tied to the availability of a local water supply there will continue to be water transfers. The Taos Regional Water Plan and Public Welfare Statement is our plan to protect our water resources for the benefit of all our region's citizens. Now, without an effective Implementation Program, it can sit on the shelf, along with the other 15 regional plans, and gather dust while water continues to flow both uphill and downhill to money.