New water council setting priorities
Posted on Sunday, November 25, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/bcdr/News/56023/
NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — The Multi-basin Regional Water Council, a newly formed organization of water-related organizations will, at its next meeting, get a consensus on what is the area’s most urgent water-related question, and then figure out how to address it, the group’s interim chairman said.
The meeting will get under way at 10 a. m. Jan. 18 at the Bentonville Public Library, 405 S. Main St. Members of the Water / Wastewater / Watershed Committee of the Missouri Arkansas Partnership — people representing various water-related organizations — came together Nov. 9 in Bentonville and formed the new Council. As its principal activity over the past year, the committee has created a referral database of survey responses from more than 20 water-related organizations in the region, which includes contiguous areas of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, encompassing at least a half-dozen watersheds.
The Council, which named Jim Gately, of Association for Beaver Lake Environment as its interim chairman, aims to help member organizations cooperate and fulfill their various water-related missions, promoting common planning and focused action; providing information-exchange and common decision-making tools; and raising public awareness of their efforts, objectives, and achievements, said the new Council’s mission statement.
Before the last meeting, survey questionnaires were completed by representatives of Beaver Water District, Benton County Department of Emergency Management, Benton County Rural Development Authority, Elk River Watershed Improvement Association, Illinois River Watershed Partnership and other organizations in Benton County and elsewhere, Gately said.
Priorities of the various organizations responding to the survey included uncontrolled development; stormwater / urban runoff; cost of wastewater treatment; and changing the public attitude toward environmental protection, and others, he said.
Gately sent participants in the meeting home with three questions, asking them to provide answers via e-mail by Dec. 5. The questions were: 1 ) How would you convince citizens and policymakers that water needs to be a priority and addressed using a regional approach ? 2 ) Argue for one of the three identified concerns — why it should be the focus of the first action plan. And 3 ) Give possible avenues for successful accomplishment of No 1 and No. 2,
“ We came up with three priorities..., from all these different perspectives on what are the key things on these water issues in this region.... (Now ) to work toward something, we’re asking them to pick... Basically answer, how would they convince the citizens and policymakers that water needs to be a priority and that we’re going to use a regional approach to it.... Then they are supposed to argue for which of the three concerns that came out of the survey should be our priority, ” Gately said Friday.