Candidate Notes on 01-WGA12

01-WGA12 on Aug 14, 2001

1. Water quality restoration is essential for economic and environmental sustainability of forestry, agriculture, fisheries, manufacturing, recreation and public water supply.
2. The Western Governors favor collaborative, incentive driven, locally based solutions to environmental and natural resource problems such as water quality restoration.
3. The governors continue to endorse the Park City Paradigm to guide water management. Its guiding principles are:
   • Recognition of diverse interests in water resource values.
   • Problems should be approached in a holistic or systemic way that recognizes cross-cutting issues, cross-border impacts and concerns, and the multiple needs within the broader "problemshed" – the area that encompasses the problem and all the affected interests.
   • The policy framework should be responsive to economic, social and environmental considerations. Policies must be flexible and yet provide some level of predictability.

Authority and accountability should be decentralized within national policy parameters. This includes a general federal policy of recognizing and supporting the key role of states in water management.

Negotiation and market-like approaches as well as performance standards are preferred over command-and-control patterns.

Implementing these water management principles can be expensive and beyond the ability of some states to fund. However, the benefits of managing the resource in this manner are significant. Therefore, the Western Governors encourage federal agencies to look for opportunities to use existing authority to provide funding, flexibility in funding, and/or shared or loaned personnel to states to help them address specific watershed problems.

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