Meeting: Sept.26, 2022

The Task Force was told that the next weeks are critical and will be the last chance for all task force members, support teams, legislative advisors to provide input, and refine their drafts to final recommendations.

Starting Oct. 3, task force members will be asked to review draft report of the Water Task Force work, prepared by the Utton Center, and a final vote to approve the final report will be held on Oct. 13.

Once the report has been finalized, task force members will be tasked to act as ambassadors at interim committee meetings during the month of October, take input from legislators and form next steps and set up a series of additional meetings with legislators over the next months during work strategy sessions. Once the final report is publicly available, task force members, especially co-leads, will be charged with holding listening/strategy sessions in communities as well as taking input on next steps from community members.

The purpose of this in-person meeting is to provide space to walk around the room, read through each group’s recommendation, use sticky notes to write down details/feedback of what it would take to reach consensus, and weigh-in with more detail on specific reasons why support is not given for the recommendation. Three groups were formed from all attendees in the room. Each group was allowed 30 minutes in front of each work group’s recommendations, displayed on wall posters, and had the opportunity to discuss issues and suggestions with the co-leads and work group members present.

Online participants were provided with a document containing all the posters presented, and task force members were asked to provide written feedback in the form of emails to Work Group co-leads by the next business day.

One task force member offered a strategy on synthesizing date in the final report by creating a preamble to identify those things and threaded throughout and identifying major themes such as capacity building (community and state-level), funding, science, water conservation, community engagement, and to let the redundancy reflect the importance of the recommendation and/or action step.

Each work group received the type-written notes of all post-it sticky’s for their group’s recommendations to incorporate and further refine the language on action steps.