Assuring a Safe and Suffient Water Supply

I spent most of yesterday at the annual Triangle Land Conservancy Conservation Summit.  We heard from a number of great speakers:

• Lessons Learned in Watershed Conservation  - Mayor Charles Meeker , City of Raleigh
• Sustainable Watershed Finance: Revenuesheds and the flow of funds - Jeff Hughes, UNC School of Government Environmental Finance Center
• Policy Update, Bill Holman- Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Director, State Policy Duke University
• Making Environmental Investments Lessons from New York City and other communities: Al Appleton, Adjunct Associate Professor at the Cooper Union in New York City and Former Director of the New York City Water and Sewer system

The key takeaways from the summit for me were:

• Water is our most precious natural resource and we must assure an adequate supply of safe clean water now and into the future.
• People care about having clean water and are willing to pay for it, but they don't want the cost called a tax.  It should be looked at as simply part of the production cost.
• Investing in "green infrastructure", protecting lands buffering streams within a watershed can be a cost effective part of a broader capital investment plan for any water utility.  In fact it should be viewed in the same way as steel and concrete infrastructure investments are in the utility business.
• Watershed inputs and outputs (water, pollution, revenues, and policies) often have different geographies and constituencies.  As such, all parties need to be at the table working on a shared cost and benefit solution.
• Developing productive and equitable relationships between urban areas and the surrounding rural communities is fundamental to long term sustainability.  The communities are highly interdependent on each other and it is in the best interest of one to help assure the success of the other.

A clean and sustainable water supply is in the interest of all, regardless of political alignment.  I am hopeful that this is an issue that can help our elected officials transcend the grid lock of partisanship.

Thanks once again to the terrific team at TLC for assembling an A+ panel of speakers and for hosting this important summit.  Presentations from the summit can be downloaded from the TLC web site.