After the Flood: Retrofi tting Austin’s Urban Core to Accommodate Growth - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 76

combined with the Environmental Management group where the water
quality folks were. And there was this mix of cultures that really was a
bit of a clash at fi rst. In the last fi ve years, we've tried to marry the two
cultures and work together to produce integrated projects as opposed to
single mission projects.” 36
Another Watershed staff member has a similar perspective on the new
integrated approach of the department:
It was a gradual change but one of the main reasons for it was because many of
the fi xes for fl ood problems became environmental problems. To fi x a fl ooded area,
one of the obvious strategies is channelization or other approaches that ruin the
natural system. And we butted heads on those things for years and years. If you
work elbow-to-elbow with people, you come to understand why we think the way
we do and why they think the way they do. Creating an environment where we
could work together was a huge step for us and it took a long time to get there. 37
The integrated approach is an attempt to fi nd common ground between
different missions within the municipal bureaucracy. Today, there is an
explicit recognition that these goals can sometimes work at cross-purposes,
and the new approach of the integrated department is to fi nd strategies
that can satisfy multiple aims simultaneously. Thus, the administrative
rationalist model of environmental management in the Watershed Depart-
ment has been transformed into a multidisciplinary collaboration that re-
quires cross-pollination to fi nd optimal scientifi c, technical, and economic
solutions. It is a nascent recognition that environmental fl ows cannot be
effectively managed in a segmented fashion because this merely pushes
the problem from one geographic region to another or solves a fl ooding
problem while creating a water quality problem. This is a common critique
of rational environmental management approaches and will be addressed
in detail in chapter 7.
One of the fi rst major projects of the newly formed department was
the ambitious Watershed Master Plan published in 2001. 38 The plan
summarizes the fl ood, erosion, and water quality conditions in seventeen
watersheds in the municipality's jurisdiction that represent 32 percent
of the municipality's land area (including its fi ve-mile extraterritorial ju-
risdictions) and the majority of the city's population. The study includes
detailed analyses of the watersheds and overlays these analyses to produce
an integrated prioritization of service needs. The authors provide a sober-
ing cost estimate of $800 million over the next four decades to fulfi ll the
Watershed Department's integrated goals, equivalent to about twice the
historical capital spending rate. 39 The implicit message of the plan is that
the municipality will need to make a substantial fi nancial commitment if