Season 2, Episode 13: Watershed and Lake Stewardship
with Mike Murray, Susan Ellis, and Tim Romanow
In this episode, Jenny and Bob are joined by Mike Murray, Susan Ellis, and Tim Romanow, who are experts in watershed stewardship. The discussion centers on the importance of public investment in water decision-making and the challenges faced in managing, protecting, and restoring water resources. The guests share insights from their respective organizations, highlighting the need for collaboration, education, and data-driven approaches to address water concerns. They emphasize the significance of building trust among stakeholders and the role of watershed management plans in guiding sustainable practices. The conversation also touches on the unique challenges of transboundary water management and the importance of building relationships with indigenous communities. The episode underscores the critical need for informed and inclusive dialogue to ensure the health of water systems for future generations.
Introductions to Mike Murray, Susan Ellis, and Tim Romanow
Jenny:
Welcome to The Gravity Well Podcast. I am your host, Jenny Ami. Here you break down heavy ideas with me to understand their complexities and connections. Our mission is to work through dilemmas together in conversation and process. I acknowledge that I live on the traditional territory of Treaty 7 and Metis districts 5 and 6. The treaties and self-governance agreements established by indigenous peoples were created to honour the laws of the land, maintain balance with nature by giving back and uphold reciprocal relationships. This knowledge and intention are what guide The Gravity Well conversation. I ask for genuine dialogue, real hearts, and openness to different perspectives. This is your invitation to find common ground with me.
This podcast is dedicated to the natural world, our children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and all future generations. The gravity well is on YouTube and streaming wherever you get your podcasts. Join us at thegravitywell.net.
Okay, thank you. I’m very excited to have some very familiar faces here today. I’ll get into introductions in a second, but we are in the first half of season two if you’re a subscriber. This is season 2, episode 13. It’s also episode 5 of a “Water in Southern Alberta” course that Bob Morrison and myself have been leading. Today we have three guests with us. We have Mike Murray, who is the executive director of the Bow River Basin Council. Susan Ellis, who is a social scientist. She’s in a group that we call the Concerned Calgarians on Climate Change with Bob Morrison and myself. We get to work with Susan regularly, which is wonderful. And then Tim Romano, who is also the executive director at the Milk River Watershed Council, thank you all very much for being here.
Why are we talking about Water and Southern Alberta? This series is dedicated to the general public. We want people involved in water such as yourselves to be able to feel empowered by the public in these water concerns. As I am a concerned citizen, that’s the third concerned citizen who feels empowered to get involved and get engaged in water decision making. We’ve talked about the history of irrigation. We then went into some conversations around the environment, had some conversations around the impacts of resource extraction around water laws and licensing and around the water cycle. That was our last conversation with Tricia Stadnyk and now we’re doing stewardships. Today we’re meeting with the three of you to talk about your work in both Lake and watershed stewardship. I’m going to stop there. I’m going to let everybody do a little bit of introductions and then we’ll get into some questions specifically for this group. And I will mention we’re going to do some future conversations in the fall. If you guys like this experience, we’d welcome you back and perhaps maybe Shannon Frank might be able to join us. Then we hope to have Shannon Frank in this conversation from the Old Man Watershed Council as well. Okay, that’s enough for me. Mike, you’re next on my screen. If you would start by introducing yourself, please.
Mike:
Well, hello, Mike Murray. I’m the executive director for the Bow River Basin Council. I had a background in ecology and did some work in that area, and then 22 years ago I thought I’d just take a look at this Bow River Basin Council and see what it’s like and work there for a little while. And 22 years later, I’m still there because just of the people that work there, the energy, the fact that we learn something new every day and just the culture of helping each other be right and to work on these challenges together has kept me here all this time.
Jenny:
Wonderful. Yes, and I have the opportunity to meet with Mike regularly as I’m on the Stewardship Coordinating Council with them. I’m still learning my way and really grateful to Mike’s expertise, it’s great. Susan, you’re next, please. Hi everyone.
Susan:
Pleasure to be here. I’m here because mostly because of my background with the Pigeon Lake Watershed Association and the extensive engagement that we conducted around the lake, it was helpful to have my human resources and behavioral science background around change because of the work that we were trying to bring about into the watershed. And I’ve just been reviewing that. I’ve been out of it for a few years, but we covered a lot of ground and I look forward to sharing with both of you. I do appreciate that lakes are very different from watershed communities. The councils have to deal with a lot more people than I did at the same time. It was very engaging. I look forward to this conversation with you all.
Jenny:
Yeah, I’m really excited to hear more. We’ve had lots of little clips from Susan about the work done. I’m looking forward to hearing it fully. Tim, you’re next, please.
Tim:
Yeah, I’m Tim Romanow. I’m the executive director for the Milk River Watershed Council Canada. Yeah, I got a bit of background in Fish and Wildlife Management. I spent a number of years working in sustainable agriculture and extension. I guess a little bit about started getting involved with the WPACs volunteering actually with the Old Man Watershed Council and their rural team probably, geez, about 2005, 2006 through the municipality that I was based in with the old AA program. I started doing some work with the Milk River Council when they got established and took on the role of executive director back in 2011. It’s been a little while.
Jenny:
Wonderful. Yes. I’m excited to hear your experience as well, Tim. Okay. Bob and reintroduction for everyone here, please, in the context of this would be great and you can lead us off into our first question. Thank you.
Bob:
I’m Bob Morrison. I’m a retired planner. I work primarily in water management and transportation. And since retirement, I’ve been involved in municipal issues here in Calgary, and I’m very interested in this conversation because the watershed stewardship groups like what Susan was involved in and the water basin councils are very valuable ways of getting people together to work on common problems. And I’m really looking forward to hearing about the experiences of everyone involved. In terms of the watershed planning and advisory councils, what are the primary issues they deal with and are there differences between your two basins?
Primary Issues to Deal with within a Watershed
Mike (00:06:49):
We have four main categories that we work in, which is convener and collaborator education, state of the watershed reporting and watershed management planning. I’d say for the Board River Basin Council, our major strength is the convener and collaborator portion. Our ability to bring people together from all of the sectors, all the different users of the watershed and engage in that dialogue that brings forth some of the challenges, some of the solutions, but also just helps everybody build a trust within that community to tackle some of these challenges. Talking a little bit about some of the differences, there can be major differences. All MW PACS have different situations that they’ve got to deal with. In the BO specifically, we are what we would call an urban central basin. We have 1.6 million in the City of Calgary. We have irrigation at the bottom end of the system, and we have parks and protected areas as well as national parks up on our headwaters.
Our situation might be a little different. We also have 15 dams and weirs on the bow. Natural flow is controlled in a way that will be different from what some of the other W packs are dealing with. They might be more rural centric or have different types of industry or agricultural presence in their watershed as well as maybe even different precipitation patterns and other considerations. One of the important things that as a Board of Basin Council we look at is that we have very few but larger licence holders. It’s a much smaller group than maybe some other basins would have controlling the water, but the bow basin is the largest contributor to the SSRB, the South Saskatchewan Regional Basin River basin. We understand that the challenge of watershed management in our area also affects many other people downstream. That is always something that we are thinking about, not just upstream, but also the downstream users that get what they’re given after we have finished using that water. It’s a responsibility, but something everybody takes pretty seriously. Yeah,
Jenny:
Yeah. Well said, Mike. The cascading effects of the decisions we make in our basin as I’m in, Bob and I are in the same basin as you and Susan for that matter versus what Tim sees. Yeah, Tim, you actually have some pretty recent examples of decisions issues coming in on the landscape in your area. Can you offer some different ways to or what your primary role is in some of those things? Thank you.
Tim:
Sure. Yeah, and to echo Mike a little bit, there’s a common weave of those four main core roles and responsibilities that all 11 of the watershed councils roll into their programming. We’re a little different in the milk. We’re a trans boundary watershed, I like to say we’re connected at the head and the hip with Montana. We share water between the Milk River and the St. Mary’s river system through extremely large diversion down in Montana, which has its own complications as it’s not really recognized as an inner basin transfer for the Government of Canada and regards to even some of our infrastructure opportunities and grants that our municipalities face. There’s different unique challenges there. But the other, even though we’re one of the smallest of the major basins in the province, we’ve got a complicated set of things that we work with. Over 80% of my watershed is native grasslands. And I like to say our work watershed management is more than just water management. And in our area, we do a lot in terms of speed at risk, supporting stewardship, doing education and outreach, hands dirty and feet wet, maybe a little bit more than some, but we really do our best to try to reflect the values and interests of the community through those activities.
Jenny:
Amazing. Yeah. Wow. There’s a lot going on there. That’s really cool to hear that you have 80% native grassland, though we always hear about the low amounts in other areas. That’s phenomenal, Tim.
Tim:
It also relates to a lot of the species at risk issues. We’ve got probably 85% of the species at risk that are found in the province down here just because of a unique landscape and at the northern end of the range for some of the grasslands and a lot of the species ranges as well. So
Jenny:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I would like to hear more from a federal perspective, some thoughts you have later, Tim. Okay. Susan, can you offer the same from you? What were some of the issues that you dealt with as a Pigeon Lake council member? Thank you.
Susan:
Pigeon Lake is the biggest lake in central Alberta, and it was developed before a lot of the lakes were more developed than most of the central Albert Lakes. We saw ourselves, or at least I saw ourselves, even though lakes are very different as leading in terms of where a lot of the other lakes would be going if they didn’t do more in terms of people living around the lake, a lot of people didn’t understand that the condition of the lake had much more to do with how we live around the lake. A lot of our issues was how to take the lake community, which included the 10 summer villages, two counties and four native bands, and help them come together in terms of seeing the lake as something that we can all contribute to the health of the lake and it can contribute to the health of the businesses.
Susan:
There’s all sorts of people that only live at the lake. It’s a place for them to bring their families, and it’s a recreation lake. Some people saw it as a backyard bathtub or a backyard swimming pool. I was there because I thought, here’s a great opportunity for people to see in front of them the consequences of how we live on the land for people to learn to live with nature, which to my mind is part of fighting climate change, is also making sure we live with nature and let nature do its thing for the climate as well. Our rules were to educate, advocate, protect, and preserve what we could around the lake. When I came on, and personally, my role was, even though I was chair of the board most of the time and grew the organization to the point where I could be executive director and finally handed off, my biggest role was as a conduit. Learning from the experts what the conditions of the lake were, what the issues were, and then finding experts that could help us find the money to bring the experts in and bring people along with educating us as we learned, bring them along and connect and engage and get their input, give them opportunities to be involved. I often said I could have six full-time people doing the work that we were doing. It was a lot of fun. It was amazing, boring day,
Jenny:
And it’s just such a great example, Mike. I could see you nodding in there as well, because it’s a big part of trying to understand that this is not something that we know. We don’t have the luxury of seeing these results on the landscape. We have to learn as we go and educate and bring people along. It’s really important to highlight that, Susan. Thank you. Okay, let’s talk more about managing issues. How do you choose between stakeholders or is that a thing, and what does it look like in terms of making sure that people have a seat at the table, that the representation of those stakeholders are there in your decision making? Maybe Tim, if I’ll let you leave this one off.
Ensuring All Stakeholders are Present in Decision-Making
Tim (00:15:05):
Sure. Yeah. Our diversity is our strength. We have a big diverse board representing all kinds of sectors. We try to make sure everybody’s included. There’s sometimes challenges where there are biases or certain things that some people are wanting to bring to the table, and we try to make sure that everybody, when they sit at the table, they’re representing the watershed council and they park their personal biases at the door if they can. We do work really hard to make sure that everybody is informed, like Mike mentioned earlier, educating ourselves and our community members is really important in terms of understanding what these issues are and understanding different facets of a concern or opportunity. We do spend a lot of work on that. I’m in a unique position, maybe in a lot of ways. I don’t think I would’ve been with this watershed council if I didn’t have such great volunteers and community interest in the work that we do.
And it’s really empowering, just same as Susan said, she could have six employees doing the work that they’re doing, and volunteers are absolutely critical to our work and making sure that everybody has an opportunity to be involved, whether they’re technical experts in a certain area or they just want to spend a few days putting some manpower in to working on a project with us. We try to make sure that they’re included. And we do have an annual election for different seats that come up, and if there is occasionally more volunteers that then we have seats on the board, then we make sure that we’ve got other opportunities, including our project teams, our research and monitoring, our community awareness involvement team, water supply and management is another one on our end, and we try to get them involved that way, and it helps even in the long-term, I think it’s actually going to help us better as an organization. It helps foster that next group of volunteers that are going to step into those other roles and keep us moving forward.
Jenny:
Yeah, that’s true. And for me, the coordinating committee is such a great spot for me to be in because I get to see what everybody else is working on, and that’s something that’s really of interest to me. I do feel really empowered in these spaces too. You guys do, if anybody listening to this is not involved and wants to get involved in water, this is the place to go. And you learn a lot and you feel like you’re in with really good people trying to do really smart things on the land. Yeah, encourage everybody to get involved as much as possible. Okay. Susan, can you offer some thoughts as well as to how you managed the balance, making sure that everybody had a seat at the table? You spoke about stakeholders already.
Susan:
Well, it’s interesting. The human dynamics is really fascinating. A lot of people get it in their minds. In our case, people would Google and find something that would work on a stormwater pond and have no concept of the scalability of some of these solutions. And there was a group who were influential movers and shakers business guys that wanted to fix the lake by putting something to bind the nutrients into the lake. And there was a group of teachers who thought we needed to educate people on becoming great lake stewards. And there was another group who said, it’s the land development and we got to work with the counties and summer villages on their area structure plans and bylaws and regulations. When I first started, I ended up volunteering with the communication committee, but I saw this and because I’d done a bunch of governance and strategic plans, I thought these guys need a plan that pulls them together.
Initially we did just a small one that was a hybrid between an operation and a strategic plan, and the board headed up committees to reach out to people in the different sectors and areas around the lake. And we moved from that. I tried to help people understand we all needed to be there. We were the voices of different groups around the lake and they all needed to feel they had representation at the table and that we were all moving up the same mountain, but from different perspectives or different sides of the mountain. Really brought most of those guys together. And I went to the alliance of the Pigeon Lake municipalities and the chair at that time. He and I were in complete agreement in terms of we had to work together, we were almost seeing each other more than we saw our own spouses at that point.
We tried to compliment and work together, forming partnerships with everybody that I could was a major thing, and go to community events, go to where people were at to get them to voice the issues, to find out what their thoughts were we could speak into their thoughts, we could educate into their concerns and get them starting to engage and think about and just have that awareness initially. And one of the issues was most of the summer councils felt it was the wastewater system around the lake that needed to be upgraded and that would fix the lake. And the PLWA board was very smart in thinking, we need to stay out of that even though we had a couple of experts on our board who didn’t necessarily agree with what summer villages wanted to do, but there’s high risk and it’s up to the municipalities, not us.
We said, okay, let them do that and recognize their roles, their responsibilities, and do what we can together. We outlined who led what PLWA communicated to the whole lake. We did a lot of communications on every front of work that was being done for the lake. We led on a lot of the education and stewardship things. The runoff on the nutrient budget that we got was the only thing that really made a huge difference for that lake. There was already internal loading of nutrients that if there wasn’t something that we could put in the lake, which looked pretty far in terms of a solution, there was a lot of pushback from governments and the cost was horrendous. We needed to do whatever we could and we adopted, we needed to turn over every single stone we could. And there were lots and lots of issues that people disagreed on. It just went on and on.
Jenny:
Thank you. That was a great summary of what you have to go through in a given process. Mike, your turn.
Mike:
I think when I first started with the BRBC, I didn’t realize this kind of thing could exist, but the power of the organization, and I think that goes for the other two organizations as well and others that I’ve worked with is the membership, the people that put their time and effort and passion and expertise into these things. The council now has over 500 members and over around 900 active participants that come from those 500 memberships. And it really is a membership driven organization. If the members want something to happen, they can make it happen. The board of directors works and is elected by their membership, and then staff does what membership the board tells them. We also have over time built different committees that engage certain sectors or interests. We have a science committee, a watershed stewardship committee, an education and communications committee, and that’s how we get our members to maybe dip their toes into getting involved and getting things done is to start working on those committees.
Mike (00:23:24):
And some of those folks then migrate up to the board or other positions. All of our work, I think, was especially benefited by what we call “watershed champions”, those that really lead the charge, and we’ve had quite a few at the BRBC that we have been very blessed to have, and most of them are still with us. And the idea of how to get things done is we try to get everybody that’s involved in that issue to get together and talk about those issues. I think what’s really appreciated is as a forum or a space where you can be open and honest about what your perspective is and you’re not going to be getting any negative feedback from that, that’s an acceptable way to approach the issue. And then everybody else gets their chances to get their perspectives out and then hopefully through a dialogue that’s built on trust and working together, the ethic of working together is you’ll finally come to a conclusion that is maybe not satisfactory perfectly for each sector but meets in the middle somewhere.
And it’s that kind of compromise and that willingness to try and find that solution, maybe it’s a hard one or not, is how we work on it. All the things that the W PACS and others do, or at least what we’re trying to do at the BR BBC is based on things like data-driven bias, neutral inclusive activities that allow for everybody. That’s one of the biggest roles about the state of the watershed that we just finished in December was it brings a level of information up to the folks who want to talk about these things. We’re not spending a lot of time getting everybody up to speed. Hopefully we can aid in that and then have these apples to apples conversations. It’s through this culture or way that we’ve done things that we generally find that there are solutions to many of the challenges that we face, and we’ve given everybody a chance to be heard about it.
I think that’s the effectiveness we have. And one example that we didn’t do, but I think is a great example of what can be done is when I first started in 2003, there was a water engagement session where all the users of the SSRB would come in and talk about water management in terms of quantity. And we did that process for two or three years and then those recommendations went to cabinet and that’s what led to the closure of South Saskatchewan to new water licences. But that wasn’t done in a fast fashion. That was done very slowly, very pragmatically, data-driven, all perspectives were heard. And that kind of activity is, I think, what builds this network of folks who manage watersheds and builds that trust between those different communities so that we can make these decisions as a system instead of siloed. I think that it all builds into that. How do you create that? I think it all is built around trust. And how do you build that with those that are at stable
Bob:
Now, Tim, you have a much different situation down there in the milk in terms of building trust and finding those solutions someplace in the middle because you’re dealing with an international stream. How is your job different in terms of building those kinds of consensus-based decisions?
Tim:
It’s still very similar to Mike in terms of relying on those champions in the community and those area leads that help. I find our role is a bit more, especially being trans-boundary. We rely on our partners in Montana and especially with the IJC, the International Joint Commission, the Bureau of Reclamation. We have a couple sister organizations in Montana, the Milk River Joint Board of Control, and I talk to those folks probably once a week at least via email if not on the phone. And that’s an interesting thing too. Our watershed council is now coming into the 20th year of operation and 20 years ago, there wasn’t that communication. Everybody was working in a silo. And I remember some of the stories from some of my producers that I worked with out west that said it’d be the end of March or beginning of April and middle of the night, it would sound like a freight train coming down the river because they turned water in from the St.
Tim:
Mary’s diversion to the North Fork the day before. And that had hit there. No one got any notification back then. No one knew that that was coming. The producers that were managing the land and living next to that bridge that could potentially have a major ice jam didn’t get any awareness. The municipalities weren’t being informed when there was going to be water management changes or whatever. And I remember when I first started, I’m thinking, this is baloney. We should really do a better job. That was one of our very first things we did to try to improve communications. And then we’ve built on that. We’ve built a trusting relationship with our partners in Montana. They’ll phone us asking about conditions or what’s going on. We’ve got into more difficult issues now in terms of some of the issues regarding irrigation demand and water use, reporting, other things that are happening up here that if it wasn’t for a relationship with our other partners, especially transboundary, we’d be in a different spot right now. But it is getting better and it’s really because of the work that’s been laid down to build relationships.
Bob:
Yes, you’ve laid a very good groundwork and maybe someday you’ll make Montana the 11th province. Who knows?
Tim:
Probably not Montana. But yeah, we’ll keep our ears open.
Assessing Data Needs for Watershed Health
Bob (00:28:45):
In terms of watershed’s assessments that you folks have been doing. I’ll start with you, Tim, again. What are the topics that you feel you have the best handle on in terms of watershed assessments and where are the areas where we need better data, better science, better information, better education?
Tim:
Again, 20 years ago there was basically no water quality data whatsoever on our system. Down here. Again, we’re maybe a little farther from some of the major urban centers and there hasn’t been as many eyes, I guess in terms and some of the research and monitoring down here. We had to start, we did some data mining early on. Our first state of the watershed report actually came out in 2008. It was a great opportunity to kindly pull together any of the historical information, but we found major data gaps. Like I said, virtually no water quality data outside of a couple small projects were collected in the previous hundred years. We said, okay, let’s try to check off some of the boxes on these data gaps and collect the information ourselves. We can make more informed decisions in terms of management and understanding the impacts of, for instance, the St. Mary’s diversion and what things look like.
We started in our own bubble and started collecting data like water quality on our own to build that information, that dataset. There was some relatively good GIS work that had been done for some of the land use planning and land management and traditional edge effects and trails and roads and things like that. We had a bit of a starting point at that point. In 2008, within about two or three years, we realized, you know what? We can’t do this in a bubble anymore. The Alberta portion of the Milk River watershed is only about a third of the entire watershed. We have transboundary partners both in Saskatchewan and Montana that are important for us. In 2012, we initiated our second state of the watershed report and we said, let’s work with our trans boundary partners.
The core team that we had established in Alberta that had put together 2008 one, we basically found out who their counterparts were in Montana and Saskatchewan and teamed them up and said, okay, Alberta’s going to take the lead here, but we want to help fill in those data gaps from other areas. We opened the Pandora’s box a little bit in a lot of ways by doing that project in 2013 because we found even more data gaps and recognizing whether it’s a species at risk issue or aquatic species at risk or water quality concerns, they’re not stopping at the border. What we’re doing is impacting our downstream communities in the Highline of Montana. And what’s happening in the headwaters of the Cypress Hills is impacting all the areas in southeast Saskatchewan. And in 2013, there were some major changes happening in terms of PFRA. The federal government was pulling out of the community pastors and leaving some major question marks in terms of what was going to happen to some really beautiful, intact native rangelands and critically important habitat for a lot of species risk.
And that project in 2013, it really helped, well one, continue to build just as we’ve been talking about, building those relationships with other trans boundary partners. But it also made us start thinking about, okay, what are issues like sage gross? We’re going to have an environmental protection order for sage gross in southeastern Alberta. Well, maybe we should be talking to our Montana partners about the hunting season that was allowing ’em to take three birds a day in north central Montana. And if those are, and what are we managing for here? A lot of difficult conversations have come built out of this, but by being able to work on these major issues transboundary, it’s helping us move in the positive direction for sure.
Bob:
You’ve been a catalyst to a lot of cooperation.
Tim:
And even more recently, of course, the IJC is bound to the Boundary Waters Treaty and it brings together the two countries in terms of water management in the trans boundary. But grassland issues, species of risk issues were all being managed in a bubble. And I know fish and wildlife biologists that worked in southeastern eastern Alberta that didn’t even know who their counterparts were in North central Montana. And now we’ve been able to build those networks and we have a group called the Transboundary Grasslands Partnership that brings all those three groups together, the three jurisdictions together annually and rotates around to build relationships. And it’s been really good because people recognize that we all have passion for the work that we’re doing, but sometimes you get so focused on exactly the issue at hand right in front of you that you don’t see the bigger picture. And our work has really helped people better connect and understand how they’re related and how their actions are impacting others. And that’s fundamental to the work that we can do in terms of bringing people together.
Bob:
Well, and Susan, you certainly were instrumental in getting people to see the bigger picture on Pigeon Lake in terms of where Pigeon Lake is now. What are the issues that you think that basically are under control, if not solved, and what are the issues that are still outstanding there?
Susan:
First of all, it wasn’t all me by any means. We had all of us, we partnered with all these different groups and many did so much in terms of moving parts forward. There was research done on the options for the lake. The government was instrumental in some of those. There was research on the lake, some of which the government did, some of which we partnered. There was a professor Rolf Fein Brook at the U of A who did, what are the cyanobacteria? We have lots of different cyanobacteria. There was research done just on the land development and what had been developed and what needed to be done. At first, we couldn’t do a watershed management plan because we felt that we needed more research and now we’re the most researched in the province, I think. But we did get a watershed management plan done that was an award-winning plan, and we’ve moved forward on a whole bunch of areas on that and we’ve got the areas that need to be continued work on.
And clean runoff is a huge issue and continues to be because people decide to build a bigger house on their lot and the developers come in and take everything off the lake. With the Alberta Low Impact Development Partnership, we created a clean guide of which a lot was used. We looked at trying to help municipalities put in place regulations and worked with Judy Stewart on a model land use by law. That may or may not be. It’s really helped in terms of some of the bylaws. Our model starts with the science and the social considerations, and then we bring it down into objectives for the plan. And those objectives then have, for example, one is clean runoff and we promote clean runoff practices under that. We’ve got recommendations to do with roads and statutory plans and land use bylaws and beaver management, you name it.
Every aspect of nature and social considerations is in this plan of which a group continues. The biggest issue is if we don’t have much cyanobacteria obvious to people, many people only go on the weekends and cyanobacteria come and go, and when it’s obvious, we have a lot of motivated people to do something for the lake. When it gets better or they don’t see it much and don’t know what a healthy shoreline looks like, for example, then they’re not motivated to do much on it. Those relationships and the ongoing awareness is a huge ongoing, ongoing issue. And most of the summer villages certainly stepped up. I couldn’t do much in terms of schools and the kids that lived in the area. Some people said, if you want to get the adults to change, you have to get their own kids after them. And after I left, the next person worked a lot with the kids and the schools.
I did bring about a family fund day that partners came: Cows and Fish Trout Unlimited, the Government of Alberta Lake management system, they all challenged us to bring something fun and engaging. And we got people from all over that area coming for three or four hours learning about the aquatic system and the invertebrates and what makes a healthy lake. And one family, as Tim said, people keep you going. One family said, “We need a lot of volunteers.” They were wonderful. The people coming together to make those things happen and the family who kept going back every year, and I said, it must be year four by now that you’ve come every single year. And the dad said, yeah, and every year we learn different stuff. It’s great. And I was just thrilled with that.
Bob:
That’s fascinating how you’ve gotten all these people involved, but that’s an interesting comment about how when things look good, the motivation level goes down and then people start to maybe not do all the things that they should do. Is that the kind of thing that you’re discovering in the bow basin, Mike, that when things start looking good, when people look at the watershed assessment and say, okay, yeah, we’ve got this one under control, do they lose that motivation or that interest?
Mike:
I think the average person probably doesn’t think about it that much because I think for the most part, things are going okay. We go into this back and forth between, oh, we’ve just had a flood, everything we do is about flood. Then we have a drought and everything we do is about drought, but we forget about the flood, which could happen. Floods can happen the year after a drought. How do you maintain an even keel when in terms of tackling all of the challenges that are out there? When I first started data, as Tim was mentioning, data was a bit sparse. It might’ve been there, but getting it was hard. Now there’s so much of it. The challenge is what do you do with all of it and what is a scientifically correct way of representing that data? I think we have a pretty good handle on the main stem, but maybe some of the areas we don’t have enough information on might be how some of these smaller systems that feed into the bow, how are they being affected by climate change?
And I think the overall question some people might have would be, where is this metaphorical cliff? If we push the system to a certain level, where is the edge? And I think if you’re looking for a gap or something maybe people aren’t really thinking about because everything seems like it’s going fairly well, that might be some of the questions that some of our members would have is with all this climate change we feel is happening, we know there’s pressure on water, we all have uses for it, and there’s only a limited supply of it, how far can we push it before we have some effect on the river that we can’t fix?
I think the average person’s probably not thinking about those challenges. But I do know that a lot of the organizations are, some of the things that as a council that we’re trying to promote is if we see a gap. For instance, we would like to see more groundwater monitoring. Our science committee has put together a small grounding group that’s going out there getting equipment and then seeking out people to measure the groundwater. The council has found funding for stewardship groups like the elbow and the Ghost River groups to go out there and actually do sampling, cabin sampling. And I think maybe the overall concerns that we are not really getting, or there’s not been a flood or a drought right this second, I think some of our stewardship partners are the ones that help us take on those challenges, and quite honestly can help the whole system by getting out there and doing their part by measuring their piece of the watershed and then reporting back so that when we do maybe see a challenge coming, we can do something about it.
Maybe not the canary in the coal mine, but that idea that if there is something that’s showing up with the steward group, maybe that sends up enough red flags or alarm bells that someone else will do a bit more monitoring and we’ll get a better handle on it quicker than we would if we just waited for those issues to show up in the main stem, which might take a very long time. The problem might’ve already gotten to a place where we didn’t want it before. You’d see the actual implications in the bow main stem
Bob:
That would be vitally important for those smaller streams that you’re talking about, but you raised the question of where is the edge, the limits, and that leads Jenny very much into those watershed plans that the councils have been developing.
Jenny:
Yeah, thank you, Mike. Because I’ve had the opportunity to have some conversations around this edge pushing too. One of the members I remember speaking to about groundwater recharge and do we know when we might push it so that we won’t have that groundwater recharge? And the answer she gave was, no, we don’t know that limit. We don’t know what we’re pushing. That’s a real example of how things look on the surface versus how things are going in the whole system are potentially two different things that the public wouldn’t appreciate. And the one thing I just want to reiterate from our conversations before I kick it back to you all is Mike, you’ve said the membership makes decisions. And I think it’s really important for people to understand that because reiterated to me, we need more public members to help understand the issue from outside of potentially the proponents pushing for decisions on the landscape.
Because the councils are limited to education. You can’t advocate for scientific outcomes or things like that. You can only educate your members and have those members make the decisions. That’s just my, I’ll say we can do this as a round of what’s coming next and some takeaways. I see we are getting close to the hour and I want to be respectful of everybody, so, if you can talk a bit, I’ll let you lead Mike about what is the state of the watershed and what are the asks the needs of the system, let’s say, and how can we help people get involved or help, or how do you help move things in that right direction, let’s say? Thank you.
Moving in the Right Direction
Mike (00:44:17):
Yeah. I’ll start with the first thing we do, and you’re correct, we try to produce good information. And I speak, I think for all the groups that are here, that these groups are recognized as trusted voices in the watershed. We work very, very hard to stay that way. And how you do that is to make sure that you have data-driven, scientifically valid information and you try to provide it in a non-biased way. We like to say that we create decision support tools. Our first two watershed measure plans that we put together, although they were not regulatory and you did not have to follow them, the 30 or so communities that helped us develop them, adopted many aspects of those plans and made them theirs. And that’s when those plans become plans, whether or not you’re forcing someone to do it or they want to do it, I think you actually get maybe a bit more buy-in if they get to choose what they get to do rather than being forced to do something.
That’s one way that we do it. And the people that we have at the table are the people that want to be there, are energized by being there and want to be part of the solution. I think we don’t necessarily need numbers, we just need those people that are interested in finding the solution. That’s what we’re interested in finding. And a lot of the watershed management stuff that we do now, 15 years ago, was probably more of an interest to CPAWS and other groups put together watershed management plans. I think that the environment has evolved a little bit more, and I think there are larger organizations that maybe W PACS can help augment their work, their source water protection plans and their other stuff. And maybe we can be more efficient with our time helping others get a better product than trying to create our own and then bringing it out to them. That’s the strategy we have approached currently, and I think that’s probably the best way to go right now with the limited capacities that we all have and trying to be as efficient as possible and the knowledge that the more people we have working on an issue, the better the outcome will be in all likelihood.
Jenny:
Yeah, wonderful. I fully agree. I think there’s so much benefit for any organization to look to the watershed councils and what you guys have already built in terms of your ability to bring stakeholders together to make decisions can be a leap forward. Speaking of which, Susan is going to help us take this work and make it even better in the fall when we get into the future. Susan, can you offer some thoughts too about how we take these plans forward? How do we keep the ball rolling, as you said, as interest comes up and down and et cetera? How do we help people move in the right direction? Thanks.
Susan:
Well, that’s always a great question, Jenny. We have to continually look at where we are and where we want to be. We certainly were able to get all of the summer villages and all of the four native nations of quiche signed off on the watershed management plans, but plans get put on Shell’s councils change, there’s new people all the time. That ongoing engagement, those trusted relationships that Mike and Tim have talked about are just so critical. And I’ve been away from the Pigeon Lake Watershed Association, but when I was there, the tools that we made in terms of that clean runoff guide in terms of the model land use bylaw, there was other directors who were very clear that we wanted to invest this for tools for the broader audience, other lakes who didn’t have the means that we had. I enjoyed so many directors who had expertise or influence, and all of this needs to go forward.
Groups really need to be clear about where they are communicating about where they are and what else needs to be done. Every year I would do, okay, this is how far we’ve come on this bar, this area, we needed to do riparian restoration work. I got a few going with cows and fish. The next year I’d say we did this many and make demonstration sites, try and get people to come out and see what a healthy shoreline looks like because there were too many that had been cleared. It’s a lot of ongoing work. And without those relationships, the summer students that I had would come from environmental science, and at the end of the year I’d say, what’s the biggest takeaway you guys had? And most of them would say, well, we came in from a science perspective, which is critical, but it’s the “people” stuff that makes all the difference.
It’s ongoing building relationships, please. I met one of the directors just a week ago. They are continuing to move this stuff forward. They now have three First Nation people on the board. We had one when I was there, and it certainly helped leverage us to build those relationships and get a committee going in terms of how we were going to engage with them. It’s an ongoing issue, but being clear and finding we had low hanging apples in the first place before there was the science. We all knew we needed to stop the furthest fertilizers and pesticides before all the summer villages eventually adopted bylaws. And it really did change the social norms to be, nobody uses fertilizers around the lake, but then new people come in and the ongoing, this is what is, and this is what you need to do. But more and more people were able to speak up in the beginning, people had to live beside each other and they didn’t want to confront. And their relationships living together was more important than whether or not they used fertilizers. Now it’s shifted. It’s just what you do, and I’m helping you to understand this is something that’s important for the lake. There’s been a lot of shifts and now some of the bigger boulders are having to be moved. One of you said isn’t obvious. That communication relationship is ongoing big time.
Jenny:
And like you said, there’s still some boulders in there that need to move. And I think that’s a thing that we’re all potentially feeling, as you said, Mike, when we have some limits coming our way. Tim, I’m really excited about the thought of the trans boundary work that you’re doing and how important that would be to help people understand how to do that work well and thinking from an energy standpoint. Oil and gas closure work, for example, to me, should also be happening on a watershed scale, not on a trans boundary scale, if you will. There’s some work there, I think too, to think about. But anyway, can you lead us off, sorry, finish us off I should say, with some of your thoughts around taking this work forward as well. Anything these other two missed?
Tim:
I think Mike hit the nail on the head in terms of how the planning environment in this province has changed quite a bit from the start of the Water for Life and Lauren Taylor’s vision for the work that we would do as watershed planning and advisory councils. And I do think that we’ve got some advantages, again, being based in the local communities, we can turn that bus a little faster than, for instance, the governing province right now. But we don’t have that local authority. Any of the work that we do, just like Susan and Mike said, has to be valuable to our community members and our stakeholders. We have an integrated water prevention plan that we spent a lot of energy putting together back in 2015. It’s 10 years old now. We’re right now trying to figure out how we are going to do this?
Tim:
Are we going to dust it off and do a check back in and see how we’re doing with those priorities from 10 years ago? If things change, where are we at now in terms of providing advice? But I know in the last few years we’ve done more work like you mentioned with the trans boundary issues, but water security and water contingency planning for drought and major diversion failures like we’ve had here the last couple years has been really important. And that’s been the valuable resources that we’ve been creating for our municipal partners, and it’s helping inform the provincial response and international response in some cases. That stuff has been really, really valuable. In recognizing we are a safe space for indigenous communities and others to be involved with without feeling that they’re being, or having legally be engaged with in ways that nations, the nations should be engaging and making sure that their vision for our community is reflected in the work that we’re doing. That’s something just as Susan said, it’s critically important to make sure all stakeholders are recognized. That’s it on the planning side of things. Yeah.
Jenny:
Yeah. Just because I know it’s out there in the public anyway, Tim, it’s my understanding that the Irrigation district has been shut off for the year in the milk due to this diversion breakdown that happened last year. Is that right?
Tim:
For those that aren’t as familiar with the Milk River Basin and the St. Mary’s Basin, one of the very first beer reclamation projects that was completed in the United States was done to transfer water from the St. Mary’s River down by Bab Montana, just south of Cardston, up over the Continental divide through two sets of syphons and really incredible technology. We’re talking about things that were engineered and the first surveys were conducted in 1903 to 1905 and engineered and built in the teens. Roll forms steel from Chicago that was brought up on barges and then on wagon trains in pieces from Great Falls to establish. This incredible infrastructure that really was, that opened up settlement in North Central Montana. But I’ve got three plus generations of residents in our area in the Milk River portion of Alberta that have never seen natural flow for 110 years during summer months on the Milk River.
We have naturally a prairie stream that really doesn’t sustain that as many as six years out of 10 in areas that would’ve had no flow naturally that has sustained flow through the summer. And then in 110 years also, we’ve got an aquatic environment that’s adapted to that of fisheries that are very unique, that are coming up through the Missouri River system that aren’t found anywhere else. Stone Cat and Western Silver Minnow and Rocky Mountain Sculp. Species at Risk that are found in the Milk River Alberta that are nowhere else in the province. And the first major, basically Chicken Little has been saying for 25 years now that we’ve got an infrastructure deficit. This equipment’s been 60 years plus its lifespan, anticipated lifespan in Montana. That’s super critical for communities in Alberta as well as over 28,000 residents and six municipalities in Montana. And in 2020 the first light went out, dropping five on the end of the system that, just below the Whiskey Gap in Montana, blew out.
And for the majority of the summer we had had basically no flow in Alberta. We’ve got about 40 farm families or independent irrigators that are completely reliant on the Milk River for their irrigation. And again, I mentioned all the extensive native range lands that we have a major forage deficit in order to be able to feed the livestock that are being restricted at timing on the grazing of the native grasslands, we need alternative forages, and that’s where the irrigation water helps make our budget. It’s been a major challenge. In 2020, they got $10 million US to make those major repairs there still, everybody thought, well, we’re out of the woodwork now and you’re not. We had about a $ 350 million deficit still of equipment and infrastructure in Montana that we’re reliant on here. Yeah, last June, we had a major failure of the St. Mary’s syphon, honestly put the Calgary situation to make it look pretty minor except for there’s not 1.8 billion.
No kidding people reliant on it over whatever, close to 4,000 linear feet of eight foot diameter syphon pipe blew out. And incredibly, they were able to get the funding in us secured to replace the infrastructure. I just got word last night that starting in two days, they’re going to be running some test flows through the new syphon and we will see some return of flow for about six weeks this summer in the Milk River here, but it’s too late. We’re in the fourth year of a shadow of a major drought in this area. And we talked a little bit briefly about ground surface water interaction earlier. Our groundwater, we’ve got a few too many straws in the milkshake this year without a lot of recharge and we’re not seeing as much base flow in the river. And yeah, our irrigators are off for the season right now. It is a tough situation for a lot of families. We’re probably looking at least a couple million dollars worth of lost revenue just from lower crop production values. But more importantly, this is the bottom line for about 40 farm families that are reliant on it, plus the residents and other water users. It’s going to be wild.
Jenny:
Yeah. I know it’s a unique situation, and I know we will have a whole other hour when I say this, but I wonder about the lessons from this on some of the other basins like we’ve talked about, Mike, the Overallocation in the South Saskatchewan River basin. What are some of the lessons to understand in terms of those emergency type decision making, which you guys obviously are heavily involved in facilitating. Thank you for that very much, Bob. You’re welcome to anything you want to catch before we let these folks go?
Approved Water Management Plans
Bob (00:58:55):
Well, I’ve got one quick question. Tim, you mentioned creating this safe space where you don’t have these legal issues that pop up often in terms of dealing with or consulting with people, but there are these things called approved water management plans, all three of you. In terms of the plans that you have or are going to develop or revise, would your areas, your lake, Susan, your basins, Mike and Tim, would you be interested in coming up with one of those or getting approval for your water management plans, or would you want to keep it one of these safer places where the legal technicalities don’t get involved.
Tim:
I just want to mention it took us about 10 years working with our partners with the GOA. We have an approved water management plan that was established just last year, quietly came out, passed by cabinet. But there’s a big difference between an approved water management plan and what I feel needs to be involved with an integrated watershed management plan. An approved water management plan is really looking at the nuts and bolts of how water is managed and regulated and it really has to have a regulatory team. Allocations, transfers, inter basin transfers, all those major issues in there. And it speaks well to that. IT integrated water management plan really has to bring all those other pieces together and that’s again, that’s that safe space and everything. But it also, I feel that I, WPS, really have to speak well to municipal needs, to community values, all those other aspects and how land use is interacting with outside of just the nuts and bolts of who gets what water. That’s where I see it is that they’re really two different beasts. They both have value maybe and they compliment each other in a lot of ways, but I really see their approved water management plan as a regulatory tool and the IWMP is this is the goalpost that we want to set ourselves for our community in the future.
Bob:
Okay. That’s interesting because when I looked at the provincial site about which ones have been approved in terms of the plans, Milk River wasn’t mentioned. I’m going to have to send a note to somebody in the province to let them know. Mike, you’re up.
Mike:
I mentioned earlier about a process that happened in the early two thousands about, and I think many of the BRBC members, in fact, BRBC was involved in that process. There is a really well working network of water users that I think the system is, as we saw in the drought, it was pretty easy to come up with water agreements. And I think that’s because that community already exists of people who want to work together. I think going forward, if we were looking at changes to the system, that’s where we got to spend a lot of time thinking about it. Because it is so complex. It’s not, you make one little change and you have so many unintended consequences. I think it’s really important to understand that before we make large changes in how it’s managed, but currently I think that the communities that are involved all work very well together and are communicating.
That’s all you hope for. Going back to Tim’s point as well is that when you do a watershed management plan, you’re trying to put together the idea that there is surface water that you’re looking at, but also there’s groundwater land uses other things that are going on and I’d like to think of our planning exercises and the report that we put together afterwards is a good place to start on new initiatives on areas of water management. It hopefully is building that crystallizing factor that helps start some new planning initiatives underway rather than trying to get something that I think a watershed management plan might be something that’s too complex to actually push through into a regulatory process. You allow a lot more openness, I think, collaborative ideas to generate from that plan rather than, I would think if you wanted to make it a regulatory tool, you’d have to really refine the scope and outcome expected for it before you could really get it through quickly. And quickly would still mean years. I think we can generate a lot more momentum as a WPACs. Now other organizations might have more power to generate something much more powerful on their own. But for groups like WPACs, I think the best momentum we can generate is through the way that we do planning now.
Bob:
Okay. Susan, in terms of Pigeon Lake, there’s lots of regulatory things there in terms of land use and those kinds of things, but you’ve had the most success in terms of getting people to voluntarily do things like cutting back on fertilizer. Do you think an approved water management plan would provide a benefit to Pigeon Lake?
Susan:
I am not sure if the government approved our watershed management plan. When I left. They had been very much involved and I think that they were going to, and I never did find out because to my mind it wasn’t that important. We had the critical stakeholders, everybody else, the government was working with us already. We had the counties and all of the summer villages and we created it as a living plan. And I think this year, the Pigeon Lake Watershed Association, it’s one of their years to review the plan and I think with the First Nations representation on the board, it will have more input from them than it’s ever had in the past. All four pieces to sign off on the vision and how to report on how we could work together or compliment each other. And the biggest thing was to be going back to it, making sure it came off the shelf and that people were looking at what’s been done, what is the next batch of things that could be low hanging, what needs to be ongoing?
And I have confidence that the people who are with the Pigeon Lake Watershed Association and the summer villages will continue to do that to some degree. The other thing is summer villages, they’re small. They can’t take anyone to court. I mean, if something came up in our summer village, the mayor would take a case of beer down to whoever was having an issue. The issuer was out of line and talked about it and tried to figure it out. People wanted us to be watchdogs and we said, no, we’re not taking that on. Although if the government, we would try and have people phone in if there was something that they saw, people used to cut down reeds in front of their place, which all lakes need certain percent of their lake to be reed beds to be healthy.
Yeah, the endorsement in terms of approval, it’s, the area concept plans and the structure plans that need to be endorsed in terms of summer villages. One administrator told a counsellor, it doesn’t matter about the bylaws because you can’t enforce them anyway. And I said, when I was on the P-L-W-A-I research and 70% of the people before they made a major investment such as development, they would look to see if there were bylaws and 70% of them, all of those bylaws. Just having them in place is really important. Even if they can’t be enforced. It’s interesting. Plans have a major part in the whole process, but for a lot of people they never see them. I ended up doing a huge survey to make sure that people knew about the areas and whether or not they approved with what was in the plan, and we got over 90% endorsement for each section of the plan. But time has gone past. Whether or not people think to look back to the plan, I doubt it. It needs people to be bringing these things forward and not necessarily in the form of a plan.
Bob:
Thank you. Those have been very useful comments, and I didn’t answer your question, Jenny, in terms of final comments, excellent conversation. I was really happy to be part of it. Thanks.
Jenny:
Yes. Thank you all very much for especially staying after work or after school, if you will. Any final things from you guys that we missed or anything you want to hit home before we close?
Susan:
I want to thank Mike and Tim for all the good work they’re doing. Thank you. So important.
Jenny:
Yes. Thank you both very much. I couldn’t agree more. We need to, we just had this conversation with Tricia Stadnik, Dr. Tricia Stadnik, and man, do we need to start making decisions on water first and foremost. I just feel that your work is vital to where we need to move forward and I’m just so grateful for all of your experience and continued contribution. Okay, let’s leave it there. Oh, go ahead, Mike.
Mike:
I just want to say thank you, Susan, for all you’ve done as well. Been folks like you or been why I love working with the BRBC and other groups. Yeah, no one does it by themselves.
Susan:
I might have to come back to the Bow River Basin Council.
Mike:
You’re welcome.
Jenny:
I love it. Yeah. Okay. Thank you all so much. Have a great rest of your day. We’ll be in touch soon.
Bob:
Thanks.
Tim:
Thank you for the opportunity.