Intergovernmental responsibilities for water supply and sewage disposal in metropolitan areas. Page: 11
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governmental responsibility for water-resource
development for their particular purpose vested in
a separate agency to which they have special access
and in which they have confidence. 8/
Although improvements can and undoubtedly will be made in
the processes by which policies are planned, determined, and
implemented, such changes are aids to, rather than substitutes for,
the adjudication of conflicting interests in the political arena,
by means of what Robert C. Wood has aptly called "a system of
preferences filtered through group representation." 9/
All too often there is a facile assumption in water matters
that if only planning were intensified, the structure of decisionmaking
overhauled, and intergovernmental responsibilities more
carefully specified, consensus and solutions would result with the
regularity of night following day. Experience indicates that such
hopes are usually unfounded. Only rarely will a plan or policy or
assignment of a function to a particular level of government appeal
to all parties. To the contestants in water politics, each level
of government is a different arena, with varying advantages and
disadvantages for different participants and the resolution of
differing issues. Furthermore, a particular course of action or
location of responsibility at the local, metropolitan, State, or
Federal level, hardly ever will advance equally a number of planning
or policy objectives or values.
As this study shows, there is considerable room for improvement
in the manner in which water decisions affecting metropolitan
areas are reached and implemented. Certainly the allocation of
responsibilities for planning, policy-making, and administration in
the urban water field should not be considered unalterable. The
remainder of this study examines these questions of policy and
organization in detail. In so doing, it will keep in mind that a
variety of divergent interests, not an amorphous public, is a fundamental
reality in the setting of the urban water problem. Nor will
the study lose sight of the fact that a particular structural or
policy change will not further, equally, all desirable values in the
solution of urban water and sewage problems.
8/ Ibid., p. 36.
9/ Robert C. Wood, 1400 Governments (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1961), p. 20.
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United States. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. Intergovernmental responsibilities for water supply and sewage disposal in metropolitan areas., book, October 1962; Washington, D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1424/m1/23/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.