Water Resources

I have been working in the area of water resource policy and management for two decades and specifically on reducing the impacts of stormwater pollution for the last eleven years. At ASWM, among my many other projects, I am currently working to identify states where stormwater management considerations are being integrated into the management of wetlands and, conversely, where the protection and restoration of natural wetlands are effectively being integrated into stormwater management planning.

Even though renewables (not counting small hydro) averaged 12 percent of the in-state power mix between 2001 and 2012, compared to hydropower that generation did not vary unpredictably from year to year. That predictability is very valuable to your electric utility, which needs to plan ahead and unfortunately can’t forecast the water year. Read more

Evan Hansen of Downstream Strategies said the bills matches up to the way West Virginia’s Senate Bill 373 started the legislative process. That bill, which was signed into law earlier this week, changed, however, as it worked its way through both houses of the legislature. “The West Virginia bill is much more comprehensive,” he said Thursday. “They overlap in terms of having new regulations on aboveground storage tanks, but the West Virginia bill includes a lot more.”

Evan Hansen, an environmental consultant who has testified about the leak before the West Virginia legislature, has tracked the cumulative effect of that objective throughout the government. “In the past ten or fifteen years, they’ve systematically weakened virtually all the major water-quality standards that apply to the coal industry,” he said. “One by one, there’s been a steady effort to undermine the implementation of environmental laws, to the point that it’s become a part of everyday normal life here.”

One of the ways our Fellows lead is by providing expert testimony before state and national legislative bodies. In March, Mike Wilson and Evan Hansen were called to testify before the U.S.