Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
In response, another municipal representative said:
I just wanted to tag on with (City representative 3), I think that is a really important part that
shouldn't just get a little footnote or caveat
Non per capita (cities) are required to do
things and it will end up looking like they are doing things and the GPCD
3
is not. When
basically, the GPCD cities have met there GPCD and they are not required to do these other
things. City representative 1
Stakeholders were also leery of the political ramifications potentially resulting
from the use of the economic proxy, though over time, they came to understand why
it had been proposed and agreed that it made sense to use standardize numbers that
were relatively unresponsive to actual organizational expenditures, since volunteers
support many of the programs.
City representative 1 voiced concerns over the way the economic proxy has been
explained as a means to rank the relative impact across highly variable program-
ming efforts. She said:
...
I think the economic proxy is a very good thing if it is accurate, but it is very scary if it is
not. It's incredibly scary. I mean my eyes got real big looking at it
...
I know that if any of
our council members saw this map, or even saw how much of the pie chart is water use it
wisely, they would have a cow. City representative 1
Another water information provider asked for clarification.
Okay so if I understand your economic proxy, you're just assigning a supposed number to
printing an item whether or not it is going to cost the city anything or just, what I'm getting
at is, are we looking at what the city is actually spending on conservation or is there no
correlation there? Representative from multi-organization coalition 1
The process involved in creating economic proxy idea and its intention was
explained before the conversation continued. As we negotiated themeaning and process
for calculating the economic proxy, trying to find a satisfactory solution, we began to
reach an acceptable compromise. It became clearer that the presence of a dollar sign and
false precision of the economic proxy was more concerning than weighting programs
relative to the effort they required. Participants made statements like:
Is there a way to measure the intensity without using the dollar amount? Because that is not
really reflective of our dollar amount. City representative 1
And:
You see, and I think for us that (information on outreach effectiveness and cooperation and
collaboration among water information providers) is a really important thing. And with our
high water users and things like that, it would be really useful to lay this over. For that reason,
I want to make sure you have really good, accurate information. City representative 2
that indicated they saw value in continuing the project. By the close of the meeting,
the participating water information providers were able to agree to a set of conditions
regarding the analysis and distribution of results from the study. It was agreed to
3
GPCD stands for “Gallons per Capita per Day” and is the standard metric against which
conservation success is measured in the active management areas under the Arizona Department
of Water Resources. However, as the quotation points out several cities in metropolitan Phoenix
operate under an alternative policy that mandates additional public information programs in lieu of
meeting water use reduction targets (Hirt et al.
2008
).
