My very first “run-in” with the Water District was over trails access policy. In about 2015 (I’m remembering dates off the top of my head here), I got a call from an insider at the County. They wanted to alert me to the draft trails access policy at the Water District.
At the time, I was the Executive Director of Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. Our goal was to improve the environment by getting people to stop driving polluting automobiles with bikes as a preferred solution. How to do that? The data shows that people will ride bikes more if they have safe, comfortable trails. So for the Bike Coalition, the District’s adoption of trails access policy was important to increasing bike ridership.
Upon reading the draft policy, I quickly concluded this was not trails access policy. It was more about restricting access.
For the purposes of this story, whether the policy was adopted is irrelevant. What I want to talk about is how this experience helped me better understand how the Water District views its role in environmental stewardship. I walked away from that experience with two main lessons.
Lesson #1
The first lesson was that like most agencies, high quality community engagement practices were a work in progress. In this case, it seemed clear to me that the environmental community was included in the policy development but other stakeholders that cared about trails were not. And I felt that the Bike Coalition's attempts to be taken seriously by staff were brushed aside.
Lesson #2
The second lesson was that the environmental stewardship pillar of the District’s work was viewed very narrowly. The smart and thoughtful staff who put the draft policy together did so through a lens of protecting the riparian corridors and they viewed proximity of human beings to waterways as generally bad. People next to water, facilitated by trails, meant that there was the possibility that sensitive habitats could be messed up by pesky humans.
As a policy advocate lobbying the District to adopt a policy that promoted trails and the use of trails for bike commuters, I was frustrated that the agency’s “environmental stewardship” mandate was not viewed through a wider lens. That lens would have recognized the incredible environmental benefit of getting cars off the roads and people on bikes.
As is the case with all these blogs, I want to make sure to translate an issue into the role of a District Director, the role for which I am seeking your vote.
So, how does this experience relate to the role of a Water District Board member today?
Community Engagement
Community engagement is a big part of why I have been in public policy my whole life. I believe deeply in democracy and the integral role that people should play. Public agencies are here to serve the public and in this case, relevant stakeholders should have been brought into the process. However, I have found over the years working with just about every jurisdiction and public agency in Santa Clara County that there is a lack of appreciation for the community’s role. Or rather, the value is not recognized enough to resource the additional work it takes to do it right.
Fortunately, this has changed over the years. I have seen the public agencies take community engagement much more seriously, whether it be communications through multiple languages or the physical arrangement of chairs at a community meeting. I’ve also watched District staff take the time to personally call individual members of a neighborhood when they didn’t hear back from someone they knew would want to be fully informed.
As a board member, this is one of the areas I would encourage continuous improvement. The District must fundamentally believe that community voice is essential to good public policy and our community engagement policies and budget should reflect that ethic. Those closest to a problem are best suited to help solve it and that’s us, the community.
Environmental Stewardship
When it comes to how the District views environmental stewardship, this is one of those areas where achieving important priorities can appear in conflict. For me, I fundamentally believe that being outdoors and exposing people to nature is critical to our ability to value nature. And I know that there are ways to balance competing interests of proximity to nature and preservation of nature. As a Board member, the first step would be to adjust District policy so that environmental stewardship is not viewed so narrowly and to start by encouraging even deeper partnerships across jurisdictions, jurisdiction both geographically and subject matter wise (open space for example.)
This is another asset I bring to the District. Having worked in housing, land use, environmental policy and transportation, I can see where the circles overlap. I can see where a District priority might also be married with a transportation mandate, like in the case of trails access policy. Or with unhoused individuals as the District pursues an ordinance to ban encampments.
We can keep our waterways clean. We can also have trails. And by working across different jurisdictions and WITH the community, we can achieve multiple goals together and better. The District already does wonderful work in this regard and as your Director, I would like to provide the policy direction to take that work even further.
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