By Chuck Wanner

Chuck Wanner is a BTWF Board member, a Fort Collins Councilman and Executive Director of Friends of the Poudre. Chuck has lived in Colorado for forty years and was in business in Fort Collins for twenty years. He holds a Masters in Public Administration from the University of Colorado.

Sounds like an assignment for Mr. Buirgy’s sophomore class ‘Civics and the Environment’, or why we shouldn’t throw used motor oil in the Big Thompson. I thought that I was going to be on the board of education and here I am writing another paper for old Burger.

Joking aside, watershed groups are like any other community opportunity to participate. They give those who reside in a watershed a chance to be informed and to use that information to participate more fully in the decisions that affect their lives. The basin that one lives in is like any governmental district in many ways. It covers a certain geographic area and it has a population (stakeholders). People living in its boundaries are affected by the decisions made about it by various governing bodies. If you do not understand how and why decisions are made you cannot participate effectively in the decisions.

Water, especially in the West, is intensely governed. The way it is apportioned has its own set of state laws. Another body of state regulation governs the quality that is necessary to put it to a given use. The extent to which pollution is permitted by various types of users is a part of a regulatory process that is a state/ federal partnership. The physical constituents of a given sample and how they react on various living things are explained by several scientific disciplines. The way it moves and how it affects the objects that it runs into downstream is an event that requires at least one more scientist and a state certified engineer to describe. In general the average basin resident is forced to just trust those who own it, regulate it and plan for its future. Most individuals simply do not have the time to stay on top of the way water is used, polluted, purified and supplied.

Watershed groups can make these complex sets of information understandable. They can convert them to everyday language and relate them to the needs that various stakeholders have in making decisions about the resource. A watershed group can take complex information about water and look at it from the various perspectives of its members, to help each of us answer the basic questions that we all ask. Is it good enough to drink? Can we swim in it? Will there be enough of it for this or that purpose? Stakeholder groups can also provide a forum for the average person to hear the arguments made for various levels of quality or quantity and help him or her understand how different actions around the water resource will affect their community’s economic, aesthetic and physical well being.

Remember, if you live in the basin you are a stakeholder. Your local stakeholder group is the best way to stay informed so that you can make good decisions about water and the impacts it has on your life.

Gosh, I better quit, it is a five hundred-word essay and if that apple polisher Schauer starts counting who knows what she will …