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Conflict Spawns Stewardship

When Don Whetstone went to the local water authority to report sighting noxious materials in Saratoga Creek in 1992, he had little idea that his action would eventually pit neighbor against neighbor, citizen against government, and environmentalist against water manager in a conflict that lasted three years and ended with a lawsuit.

"The community began seeing the creek as a dividing rather than a unifying factor," says long-time stream preservation activist Mike Rigney, who followed the emerging conflict and who is now launching a model program to forestall similar outcomes in the future. That model will show citizens, teachers, students, officials and water managers in the Saratoga Creek zone how they can merge management and monitoring of the roughly 16-mile-long waterway's environmental conditions with community creek stewardship.

Two things are big news about the model program. First, it's the first time the region is trying out what Rigney calls an "integrated community involvement program for watersheds." What Rigney means is that the program will merge the volunteer-based citizen creek monitoring that his Coyote Creek Riparian Station is well-known for with the education efforts (signage, festivals, school curricula, etc.) that other groups such as the S.F. Estuary Institute have perfected. "We're trying to balance watershed assessment with watershed awareness," he says.

The second news item is that the program has just been funded - in part from the recent lawsuit settlement and part from the Bay Area Stormwater Management Agencies Association.

Key components of the 18-month-long model program include: an inventory of habitat, hydrology, water chemistry and stream channel characteristics along Saratoga Creek conducted by trained community volunteers (the inventory will also establish permanent sampling points and a data base); a community outreach program that trains volunteers to detect and report illegal waterway discharges and to distinguish between real pollution problems and natural stream processes; a watershed festival in conjunction with area schools and local political figures; and the development of a watershed-monitoring and stewardship-based curriculum for schoolchildren. The new program will also evaluate data collected along the creek to assess the effectiveness of the integrated model in improving the overall health of the watershed.

Saratoga Creek offers a good proving ground, says Rigney, because of the high degree of community ambivalence and agency controversy surrounding its use and abuse, and because of the creek's mix of pristine open space and affluent residential and degraded urban areas along its banks. If the model can succeed with Saratoga, it will offer a sound strategy for other watersheds across the region, he says.

Contact: Mike Rigney (408)262-9204

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