From FastCoexist.com (Charles Fishman):
Water problems have been front and center recently, between the disastrous lead poisoning of Flint’s water system and the drought that has now plagued California for half a decade. So the water community was quietly hoping the first-ever White House Water Summit on March 22 might be something like, say, the Olympic diving competition. High profile. Attention-grabbing, even if you don’t normally pay attention. With a few truly astonishing performances that might go viral.
It was an expectation built in part by weeks of small-group meetings and preparation by the White House, that water problems would, for a day, take center stage in the national policy discussions—and that water might then join other issues, like energy and jobs, in getting much more routine attention.
Instead, the summit was more like a July afternoon at the local community pool—a few too many people crowded into the water for anyone to really stand out. At a preliminary event in December, the White House Roundtable on Water, administration officials had suggested they might ultimately announce a bold national stretch goal related to water: to cut total U.S. water use by 33% from current levels, for instance; or push to cut the cost of desalination by 75%, so desalinated water had what the White House called “pipe parity,” no more expensive than water from a reservoir, well, or river.
In fact, at the summit, water conservation wasn’t even a topic of any of the dozen sections. Desalination, if it came up at all, was mentioned only in passing.
The summit, instead, was a quick tour across the wide horizon of water issues: replacing outdated pipes in cities, providing resilience to water utilities (and also farmers) in the face of climate change, and paying for the infrastructure work that needs to be done. Thirty-one people spoke, about 14 topics, in the course of three-and-a-half hours. Everyone got about seven minutes.
Although the summit had a little gloss of a big event—everyone got to go home with a box of M&Ms or Hershey kisses signed in gold by Barack Obama—in fact it was little different than a lot of water innovation meetings held around the country. Undoubtedly valuable, effective in connecting people from different water communities who don’t see each other that often, but not game-changing for water issues, not even game-changing for the people and projects spotlighted.