Transcript

Clive Strong: One bucket of water has to serve a multiplicity of purposes

As I was listening to the discussion, I think that we are really missing the major issue -- we've got one bucket of water and it has to serve a multiplicity of purposes, and we tend to spend a lot of time fighting over who makes those decisions rather than deciding where the common interests are at. And until we come to the table and people share where their common interests are and how we can make the water achieve those multiple purposes, we will continue to have this kind of dialogue. But at the end of the day, the one beauty of water is it is a very, and I don't mean this to be a pun, fluid resource which we can manage in many different ways to achieve a multiplicity of purposes. As Mr. Keys has noted, we've been able to do that in the upper Snake River basin, particularly in the context of the Endangered Species Act where there have been concerns about the need of water for flow augmentation. We've gotten past the issue of the science and we've looked at practicalities. We were able to devise a system under state law to achieve that objective. I believe that we can continue to that as long as we look at interest as opposed to positioning.

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