Congress Tests The Waters: Sustainable Watershed Planning Act, Part 2

No sooner had I posted my assessment (10 August 2009) of a draft version of the Sustainable Watershed Planning Act than a new, improved version popped up in my inbox. It has taken me a while to get through this second version; a lot of changes have been made. The proposed Office of Sustainable Watershed Management (OSWM) is still in there.

Here's your very own copy:

Download WatershedPlanningBillDRAFT080709

This bill may be considered by the U.S. House of Representative's Water Resources and the Environment Subcommittee of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) is the chair; Rep. John Boozman (R-AR) is the ranking member. Here are the subcommittee members. I say "may be considered" because the bill does not yet have a number and is a work in progress. Hearings have not been scheduled.

General Observations

1. There is no longer an OSWM Advisory Council comprised of federal agency heads , state reps, and other stakeholders.
2. When compared to the first draft the Director of OSWM appears to have acquired more power and approaches the status of a 'water czar'.
3. Instead of selecting regional watershed planning boards based upon boundaries of each USACE Civil Works District the Director would identify and support ten regional watershed planning boards, each of which can be no smaller than a 4-digit HUC (Hydrologic Unit Code) watershed (subregional level). Note that there are 222 such watersheds in the USA, averaging about 16,800 square miles.  Keep in mind that the HUC approach pertains to surface watersheds, not groundwatersheds.
4. Selecting the ten regional watershed planning regions will be challenging, to say the least. Criteria? Politics, anyone?
5. What happens after the ten planning regions finish their tasks? Are they to become self-sustaining?
6. The Director is charged with developing a national water policy. This is a daunting task. No doubt the Director will seek asistance, but I prefer the approach being proposed by Rep. John Linder (R-GA).
7. The Director is also charged with developing a research agenda, another challenging task, but one that was done almost ten years ago by the National Research Council's Water Science and Technology Board.
8. The EPA Administrator has a more prominent role than in the original bill, mainly distributing money on behalf of the Director and OSWM.
9. The bill asks for a lot of money. This is only bad because legislators might be getting "budget burnout". In the grand scheme of things, it is not a lot of money.

Curmudgeon Alert

So called because some might consider these the grumblings of a GOM (Grumpy Old Man).

The name of OSWM should be changed. Sustainable means different things to different people, but since that term is so ingrained these days, it's tolerable. Besides, it makes many people (myself excluded) feel good.

The term watershed is certainly appropriate, but ask most people (including water professionals) what image a watershed conjures and they'll say: "River basin.' That's fine, but I am concerned that groundwatersheds, which can underlie two or more 4-digit HUC surface watersheds, will get short shrift (they will).

The word management may have baggage when it comes to the Federal government and water. Ask Westerners about the Feds and water management and they are likely to look perplexed or worse. But it's better than saying planning; try juxtaposing Federal government and water planning in the same sentence. The OSWM will not be doing water management. So drop it.

I would call it the Water Resources Act, creating the Office of Water Resources. Simple and straightforward.  If it is really critical that sustainable be included, then: Sustainable Water Resources Act and the Office of Sustainable Water Resources.

The document says climactic when it means climatic. It should also say surface water and groundwater, not surface and groundwater.

Transboundary as it pertains to aquifers needs clarification. Are transboundary aquifers only those underlying portions of two or more states or entities that are TAS (treated as states, e.g., Indian reservations), or are international ones included? This is important because the bill will not "affect the water rights of any person or entity using water from a transboundary aquifer."

If you are going to evaluate groundwater recharge and use in a planning region, then you might as well add groundwater flow and discharge.

Okay, now for the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Good

• OSWM provides money to states for water planning.
• Supposedly does not tread upon states' water prerogatives.
• Will honor exisiting treaties, compacts, and avoid (unfunded) mandates. 
• Congress is proposing this type of legislation.
• Ambitious 

Bad

• Planning regions: potential bias toward surface watersheds at the expense of groundwatersheds.  
• What about the engagement of local agencies (counties, municipalities) with land-use planning responsibilities? 
• Unsure why the EPA Administrator is now "plugged in" since the OSWM's charge goes beyond water quality, the EPA's traditional interest in water. The OSWM encompasses water allocation, use, etc. So why might EPA's involvement be bad? Two words: "regulatory agency". Let OSWM distribute the funds, or use some non-regulatory agency (USGS) if an agency is needed. 
• No more OWSM Advisory Council, which could have helped the OSWM Director do her job, especially since OSWM must rely on Federal agencies for a lot of its work. 
• Unsure how this bill will promote coordination among Federal water agencies, except perhaps in the ten selected planning regions. The deleted Advisory Council could have helped to do this.
• How is "sustainable" defined?  Economically? Hydrologically? Environmentally? Socially? I know this sounds like nitpicking, but it isn't.
• Buy-in from all the key players in the ten selected watershed planning regions could be an issue. The regional watershed planning boards have to do a lot of work, so buy-in is essential.
• The bill goes into great detail about what types of persons must be appointed to the regional watershed planning boards. This is too much of a top-down approach.
• The GAO is to evaluate each regional watershed planning board. I would much prefer to see a group like the National Academy of Sciences or the National Science Foundation involved, although assessing ten boards would be quite a task. Why not leave it to the Director of the OSWM to arrange reviews?

Ugly

• How do you deal with 'virtual watersheds'? Consider the case of Los Angeles, whose 'watershed boundaries' extend into Northern California, the Great Basin, and the Colorado River Basin. 
• The OSWM Director must use USACE Principles and Guidelines to evaluate projects, regional water plan activities, etc. The Director should be allowed to use whatever procedures she deems appropriate, as long as consistency is maintained. If the choice is the USACE P&Gs, that's fine.
• I do not see how this bill will "ensure the sustainable use of the water resources of the United States". It may do this in the ten planning regions so selected but I don't see this accomplished on a national scale.

WaterWired's Take

I am very glad to see Congress tackling this issue and willing to spend some money on it. This particular bill will not accomplish what it wants to on a national scale. Nor can I see how it will improve Federal agency coordination vis-a-vis water. It is also far too "top-down" for my tastes. 

But I would very much like to see something like this passed. And soon.

"Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself." -- Unknown

Comments

[Leslie Kryder]

Michael,

I share your distrust of the word “sustainability” because the term is so fuzzy it can mean many things. What follows is an excerpt from a paper I wrote reviewing several books, including the two below that explore what “sustainble” might mean on a practical level.

Leslie

Extract:

Hempel, L. C. “Conceptual and Analytical Challenges in Building Sustainable Communities.” Toward Sustainable Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy (1999).

Hempel wrestles with the juxtaposition of two fuzzy concepts: “community” and “sustainability,” asking at what order of magnitude and what timeframe they are best considered. Further, how to implement the resulting ideal of “sustainable community.” To create a “sustainable community,” however defined, requires interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving and policy development; and this fact increases the difficulty of achieving the needed changes from a political viewpoint. Hempel identifies four “clusters of sustainability approaches,” each of which is favored by a different discipline: 1) natural capital, favored by ecological economists, 2) urban design, favored by architects and local planners, 3) ecosystem management, favored by natural resource managers, and 4) metropolitan governance orientation, favored by regional planners. He suggests that communities come up with indicators to measure progress, but notes that the measures the average citizen supports may be quite different from what professionals would prefer.

My perspective:
Hempel asks an interesting question which I had never considered: when one says “sustainable,” what timeframe does that mean? Are we trying to create a community that will endure for millennia? Several hundred years? A generation? This is an important question as regards water planning.

Wheeler, S. M. Planning for Sustainability: Creating Livable, Equitable, and Ecological Communities. Routledge, 2004.

Wheeler dares to make use of the slippery term “sustainability.” He discusses the history and evolution of the concept and explores various definitions of the term. Next, he situates sustainability within the evolution of planning theory, tracing the development of various planning theories: rational comprehensive theory, neo-marxist planning, participatory and communicative planning, advocacy planning, theories of urban social movements, and institutionalism. Coming to sustainable development, he explores its relationship to economics, the environment, and equity, and concludes that a theory of sustainable planning must address all three areas in order to achieve a sufficiently holistic approach. In the second half of the book, Wheeler discusses the opportunities and challenges of integrating sustainable planning at various levels: international, nations, state and provincial, regional, local governments, neighborhood, and site planning. Since incorporating sustainability into planning is a relatively new idea, he warns readers to expect resistance, and to adopt a strategic and patient approach to integrating this idea into various contexts.

My perspective:
As a society, we’re only beginning to come to terms with the limits of natural resources. North Americans have been in the enviable position for several hundred years of having access to vast, untapped resources. What are we going to do when we come up against the limits of nature’s bounty? There is only so much arable land: it can be used to grow food or fuel crops. There is only so much water, and there is a minimum limit to the amount of water that will sustain a person and the natural environment. Given that on the macro scale unending growth is not possible, how can we develop processes and economies that recognize and respond to natural limits? We would do well to consider other societies, for example Western Europe, and study their approach to supporting their population with more modest (and carefully husbanded) land, forests, and other natural resources. I wonder whether their more limited situation has any bearing on the tendency of European countries to rely more heavily on central or national government policy and oversight.

[aquadoc]

@Emily: Thanks for your kind words. The bill shows the typical bias towards surface water with little concern for the peculiar characteristics and importance of groundwater. We need to move beyond this thinking. The use of 'sustainable' is regrettable but designed to garner more support, I suppose. It's a word that has been used so much that I'm no longer sure what it really signifies.

@Wayne: I appreciate your comments. I agree - locals can do a better job than the Feds although there are places where the Feds' involvement is critical - international and interstate (intractable ones, anyway) problems and where the Feds have a significant stake in water resources (BuRec, USACE projects, etc.). But this bill is too 'top-down' for me.

We need to develop a national water policy, or strategy, or vision (whatever you wish to call it) to elucidate some basic guiding principles. I don't want a national water plan.

[Emily Green]

Herculean post. Thank you. To everyone who has never waded through long bills before, it's hard. It's bloody hard. So thank you. OK: Always agree about keeping language simple. "Sustainable" is generally used to pander to the wishful and would get the backs up of real water people. To my eye, the most important points you make are the ones about groundwater, whose subterranean routes have little in common with political boundaries, and whose management will decide the fate of our surface waters.
Fascinating post. Thank you.

[Wayne Bossert]

I have to admit that I tend to be of a "states water rights" mindset, and this effort reminds me why.

If any water planning, management, influence (or whatever you want to call it) is to be done, I'm thinking that the citizens in the area have the best chance of directing, supporting, opposing or amending such decisions/actions when they are taken at the local and state level - not the federal level. Could it be that simple? To me it is that important.

Having said this, I'm thinking the appropriate federal role would be in technical and finacial support for local and state water planning and desired programs. Yes, it's important that the federal agencies coordinate their activities, but we need a new, comprehensive law to make this happen?

I simply think the downsides outweigh the upsides on this issue and any area that allows federal intervention in their water planning and management are moving these issues a big step away from the citizens that will be the most affected.