Water-Centric Planning

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Ray Fung

    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Those who are in the front lines of local government are embattled, stretched to the limit, and under-appreciated. But they are not alone. They can look to the network for inspiration, peer support and hope,” stated Richard Boase, Vice-President of the Partnership for Water Sustainability in BC


    The Partnership embarked on a multi-year transition strategy in 2023. The strategy is designed to achieve two outcomes in sequence. The Partnership continues to add to the leadership team; has crafted what the Partnership and network would look like after 2025; and recognized and acted on the need to accelerate the strategy to put in place leadership for 2028 and beyond. To achieve our intergenerational mission through the network, the Partnership launched the Ambassadors Program in 2021. The ambassadors are the bridges across boundaries.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “We proceeded on three parallel tracks and established relationships with a new generation of provincial decisionmakers and staff,” stated Ted van der Gulik, President of the Partnership for Water Sustainability (January 2024)


    “The Partnership is the engine for a network in the local government setting. Our mission is intergenerational. This means we are striving to bridge the gap in understanding; and we are doing what we can to help governments overcome organizational amnesia. The clock is ticking, and we are working hard to shape this outcome: what the Partnership and associated network will look like after the Year 2025. In 2023, we exceeded our own expectations. We are ahead of schedule in moving forward with the strategy for network continuity,” stated Ted van der Gulik.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “The benefit of assigning worth to a stream corridor as an asset is that it leads to consideration of efforts needed to maintain that asset. To borrow a framework from the financial world, a Maintenance and Management (M&M) budget needs to be assigned to keep up the performance of ecological services beyond the natural asset’s initial ‘capital’ costs,” stated Ray Rung, retired Director of Engineering (March 2022)


    “Formal responsibility for the services that stream corridors provide, as equivalents to engineered assets, mostly lies with local government. EAP, the Ecological Accounting Process, puts M&M of stream corridors and wetlands on an equal footing with say, pipes and pumps. The methodology and metrics recognize the importance of the stream in the landscape. EAP supports local governments that intend to include stream systems in asset management calculations. Through EAP, local governments have a guiding philosophy, methodology and metrics to make a financial case for stream systems,” stated Ray Fung.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Different local governments will always be at different points and different levels of maturity along the asset management continuum. This is why we focus on outcomes and do not prescribe what to do in BC,” stated Glen Brown, Asset Management BC Chair, in 2015 when he unveiled the branding image that conceptualizes what the journey by a local government would look like to achieve Sustainable Service Delivery for Watershed Systems


    “We framed the Asset Management Continuum as a series of three steps, recognizing that most local governments were at Ground Zero in 2015. Our operative phrase was ‘as understanding grows’. We saw this as the key consideration for local governments progressing along the continuum. Although it might be possible, we believed it unrealistic to expect anyone to jump directly to Step Three and integrate natural systems into their asset management strategies. We needed a way to illustrate this diagrammatically. This led us to the concept of a continuum,” stated Glen Brown.

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