frame the sib jekt. we don't want them to constrain, it's just to give them structure. we want to hear from as many people as possible. panelists certainly, but you as well. what decisions you think need to be made quickly and what strategies you think have been useful. decision making, taking action in your field of work. we want to hear about what you need that this group could help you with, so you could be more effective in taking on and acting effectively on climate change. we're going to spend about 20 minutes on each area and as we begin each discussion area i'll ask a volunteer panelist to speak briefly and try to get comments from two or three of you on the floor and if we have

time we'll go back to panelist. i'll ask people to stick to three minutes and the crew of eagle aye and microphone carriers i assume are available today i assume will find you and then when three minutes is up, they will leave you. tough love so we can hear from as many people as possible. we will break at forty five minutes after five so i can eat a muffin if there's one left and we'll talk about engineering and leave time for last thoughts. that won't be your last chance. i'm told the website is opened for several days so if you leave and have not had a chance to speak or you think of something later, please write

to the website so the staff can see what your thinking. you've been given cards and i want to remind you about two particular questions. what can our agencies do collectively to come back and respond effectively to climate change. question two, what specific actions are you doing now or what specific ideas do you want to hear from others about climate change? and if you will and those in to staff all of those will be taken by them and synthesized into an action plan and focused on not what we're doing for the next 30 years, but steps in the near future to continue to develop our capacity to work together and lend incite and support.

having said that, we're going to start with the first topic, public engage meant. will one of our panelists speak briefly about public engagement? barry. i see volunteering in your,e yes. >> two things. a terrific start to public engage meant is evidence by this conference. not just to the water community but attention from the stake holders and media and increaseing a warness so building on this conference is something that i think is tremendous valuable and not just for the inside water community. second, simple public awareness i want to mention because it came out of our experience in california.

a number of agencies decided to support, the bill, ab 32, that started because they asked themselves conversation with folks working on climate issues, if they thought we needed a mandatory cap on greenhouse gases, and the answer after it got a great deal of thought the answer was yes, it's not a silver bullet but it is part of the solution. >> a number of them said why don't you start with saying that publically. it's not taking opposition on legislation but that sort of policy statement to the general public that climate change has significant impact and we can't just plan for the worst case scenario, we have to think of it's an a policy issue before

we get to regulatory and that's something we urge to get the public to think about. >> i think conveying to people what we realize and getting it on the radar screen is important. is there a participant that can help us think about participation or public engage meant? >> hi we're focused on local solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. our approach to this issue is develop a community climate action plan which we're currently launching and that's one reason i'm here is to probe the knowledge that the audience as a group to find out what can be done specifically in the

waist water sectors but we're trying to conceive this thing pass being sort of a synergistic combination of transportation - looking at transportation, land use, water use, waist water, and solid waist and energy. all of those things working together to bring up a focus on how we can achieve significant reduction in the community. like jarrod said, it actually occurs locally. that's what we focus on. public outreach is a key element for us and we work with community environment groups and just but - using the plan kind of as a faveus cuss in terms of how you do it and in terms of what specific actions can be taken.

>> thank you. >> i'm paul the general manager of the grand municipal water district. one of the things we're doing in california and this is sponsored by proposition 50 and proposition 84, is regional water management integration planning and all the reamal entities have participated in this for the last year. but in the bay area we talk about overlaying that planning process with a focus on climate change and i talked to lester snow last night about this and i'm glad to hear the department will be promoting that but that's a good forum for the work we're talking about here today. with all the partners the local agencies and others and there is a public engage meant component as part of that.

when we develop the plan one element we try to do is reach out to community groups and stake holders. i think that's one place california already has a process in place and it would be helpful for all of us to focus on climate change as part of that process. >> thank you. >> good morning. larry wilson. i'm thinking as a product of this summit that we should come up with a statement of the reality of science as we see it today. we all agree that certain things really happening. we ought to state the obvious. a statement from this summit signed on to by the participants here and if we can do that along with some of the back up issues about the action plans and stuff like that we can probably put out a product

with a value of national interest. >> i think we're not going to try to take action today, but in the follow up that we'll be circulating and there will be on going dialogue through that mechanism and those are things we can consider, because i think everyone feels a lot of need to get out with some of the things we've formed consensus about over the past day. let me go back to a panelist now. >> well a couple of thoughts in terms of public engagement. my mind goes to the whole need for a sustained marketing strategy. this is a big, long-term issue. we all talk about it in different terms and sound bites and there's no sustained product. when we try to get the public

interested we're competing with iraq, healthcare, just to name all the things out there in the media all the time and there's no uniform way we describe this. it's this abstract thing way off in the future and unless we make it marketable for the public they're going to support the billions and billions to address this now for the future. it's not just the city of san francisco or the department of resource there has to be a much more sustained campaign to address these issues. >> i think that's very true and i will talk about new yorks

plan to engage the city to think about the problems. two often problems are war memorial complex sorry, water related and hard decisions that need to be made in the city regarding water issues. this is the first outreach which was a supplement in new york times and daily news which i think is the most circulated paper in new york city. and getting bigger as time goes on we'll try to engage in some of this thinking where people are thinking of this early and not just presented with a plan to go, thumbs up or down on it.

the idea of putting sustained conversation with consistent information is very important. this is new york city does not preclude the water utilities thinking about climate change and water and the things that go along with that and trying reach out nationally. one more. last one. >> i'm representing the endangered species coalition. made up of four hundred different groups. i guess my question from yesterday revolved the impacts of global warming like the, eco basis. >> i don't want to disappoint you but we're not going to be able to do questions. so i hope you can make this a comment. >> i would encourage water managers and people included in

water matters try to preclude or include other species and in the process early on rather than late in the game which has occurred down through history where water decision implications have negatively impacted species that we end up dealing within confrontational ways so if we can get started with that earlier rather than later, that would be good. >> thank you. i think we need to move on. i apologize. let's take a few minutes thinking about legislative actions and that's local, state and several times in conversations yesterday i heard congress comments and how to engage them, certainly california, the local water authorities have a lively

relationship as with their legislatives as we do in new york so i would love some thoughts about that. chuck, i thought we would start with you. >> i think there's a couple of things relating back to public engagement issue. i thought about my city council sitting here yesterday and one member is really a climate change geek. he's the chair of my subcommittee so for him it's easy to sit down and talk about this but for many officials, whether it's boards or commissions you report to, it's not - if you want to sit down and have this discussion, it's not going to get far, but i think legislative engage meant, what are the consequences in simplistic terms - i know it's terrible to say that - what are

your consequences to their election as far as this goes. what can you give them to give them political credit with not human down sides. this is like a comprehensive strategy on public engage meant you should have the same strategy on how to get legislative support for whatever programs you think need to go forward. i have great staff, as you all do, whom if you give them a task they can solve the problem. i can do that but i need the legislative authority to let them do their job. so the challenge is how do we take all this complex stuff, and distill it down to consequences maybe short-term and long-term they can

understand from a political and election and constituent perspective so it means something to them and i think that's really the challenge. >> comments about legislation or things you've tried or comments about it. >> hi i think just in line with what everybody was saying, all of us may not be environmentalists in this room but when you converse with someone that does not know about this you have to be a warrior about it and stand up and say something and don't be quiet but spa speak your mind

and voice and put forward what you think is real and in time things can change and minds can change and people can move on but we have to not be quiet about it and just keep pushing. >> thank you. yes? >> i'm with the water out of alexandria, virginia, i want to address legislative things but public engage meant. i think the most important things we can do in terms of communication with the hengs, is water is one voice. it's very important. when i say water, i mean water and waist water. it's very important that the message dare that i completely agree it has to be clear and distinct but right now we have echos and when we speak to

washington there's an echo effect and we need to be one voice and i think that needs to be clear. >> thank you. yes? >> hi, i'm with the california public utilities commission. i watched the news last night and another senator was really claiming on the debate on global warming, gee, i think you're saying it's profitable for the green industries now and i'm thinking, of course it needs to be profitable and really the fossil fuel and oil industries that are making hundreds more times more profit and that's what drives this. if we could internalize externalities and middest oil and regardless of your political leaning if you or we

could internalize that that's what it takes to drive the point home to the public. people don't see the profitibility of it. the profitibility of it if they see it, it could achieve it. it's an inconvenient truthfulness. it's rather from your gut than based on facts. well, because i have a vested interest, without saying so, this is my opinion. that comes from a high level as far as kind of covering up the truth and talking what we want to be rather than what we see. that and the others might be a good point of view. >> thank you. i will go back to a panelist now. brad? if i can get your comment? >> you know, i'm interest in

the federal angles here. what i see is this great opportunity that will rise in 2008 and i don't think it's realistic to think we'll get much support until that time. i think it's actually encouraging to look at what you all do in the history of every environmental action in the past. super fund, clean water and air acts. all of those actions have had state analogs. everyone. the feds stepped in because people said we can't have this quote, work of actions out there. so what happens here and oregon and washington and new mexico and montana, really do count. i would encourage all of you - it's unbelievable to come here from colorado or nebraska - you know we have straw coming out of our ways and in other ways

we're quite sophisticated and you all are leading the pathway and i encourage you all to lead and not get discouraged we're going to get support on the presidential on both sides of the aisle whoever gets it will act on it and those are my comment as little more inclusive than that on the legislation side of that. >> yes? one more. all right. two more. >> jim, kennedy jinx consultant. i think from california stance point the low angle thing here is to make sure that the rules being written and regulations as to how we're going to

establish eligibility criteria and ranking for infrastructure some 37 billion dollars and bonds being proposed is a real opportunity to make sure these considers are included. considers like that were they included in water bond, state water project we might have an outcome for this. >> thank you. one more. water assignment campaign. [inaudible] one part of this is politics. maybe we're a little too gentle, maybe you think of

rational ideas of things happening. the 4 point 5 billion dollars for reservoirs and conservation and that's politics. so - the same applies to public engage meant. it's messy. we can't possibly expect to not have to deal with the rudeness and everything else. >> i think that's certainly true, although i'm not sure participants are incapable of dealing with that. they don't look like they would be steam rollered over by a little rough interaction. maybe we'll see later. we had one more over here and then i'm going on to the next topic. >> home doug wallace and i'm

happy to be a little bit impolite. speaking of federal leadership and one of the things that gets me is subsidies for ethanol. we have to help legislation understand dead ends in negative impacts to generate true solutions that actually reduce the carbon footprint. >> thank you. i think we can bridge to regulatory fairly ease lu at that point and i was going to ask jeff to comment on regulatory issues and how they employ bead some of your issues. >> thank you, emily. one topic i think of with regulatory aspects. we're trying to do what we call

integrated regional water planning menl meant but it's difficult and foreign. we're trying do it on the water aspect and introduce, sewer, water and flood control and we don't do that very well. most of it is split by boundaries. i'm lucky because i have a regional agency and mine over lies a whole host of flood control areas and water basin manager's and sewer projects and we're trying coordinate with all of them on integrated projects and we have no input in land use other than commenting which is a whole host of other cities and counties. so, we're not very well coordinated in terms of our

planning and that is a tremendous draw back and it's a good effort we're trying get together in terms of water resources but we're at a very early staple and that perhaps ties back to legislation and it's local land use speculation and all of that on water supply and issues we have little coordination. it's very difficult. >> i think one of the most interesting things, as water management agencies we deal with tremendous amount of regulation coming from a lot of different places and it can be extraordinarily time consuming and sometimes, lead you into - some times in order to accomplish one regulation you might go out of compliance with another one, so in my mind having away to cut through this

and bringing regulators together to understand some of these issues, and perhaps, really trying help instead of something that keeps us tied up every day and makes it difficult to step back and think about climate change issues is very important part of our being effective so the hope of this group is there's incite in ways of doing that. there will be a county or state, or city that's doing this effectively and we can take that's an a template to our own environment and a slow kate that. i would love to hear more from you about regulatory and legislative issues and how the legislative regulatory and planning issues tend to cluster together. so if you have things you've done that have been helpful or

strategies you are thinking of trying, or things where you think regulators are impeding important climate issues you can speak now which i would very much appreciate or write to the website if you think about it a little further. is there anyone that can speak today? yes? >> hi i'm will travis and development commission or if you watch,cnn, i'm travis mills. but that's okay. as a regulator, i think it's important to listen to the rhetoric of cutting through regulations and streamlining them, i think it's important to remember those regulations were all put in place in reaction to

some abuse. they are advancing veryly get mate enlightened public policy. what you may see as an imped meant is really a regulation put there to protect environmental resources. some people commented on my remarks yesterday that i talked entirely about the economy and nothing about the environment eventhough we're seen as an