Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Stakeholder Review Draft: Groundwater Model Development Project

The following is an email exchange between Jackie Host, President of LAWA, and Alfred Canepa, Associate Director, Department of Resource Management at the St Johns River Water Management District, on July 25-26, 2011:

Greetings Al,

In reviewing the draft for the collaborative effort on the regional groundwater model development project I noticed that the third party Stakeholder was “other parties yet to be identified”.  I have received a flurry of communications regarding this from members of the community as one cannot help but notice all of the stakeholders that are identified are utility, agriculture and phosphate companies.  I am very hopeful that you are considering some other participants such as University of Florida or USGA professionals to balance your working group. 

If I understood Jennifer correctly, this is a technical working group for the groundwater model and will have no direct bearing or will slow up any progress on the Stakeholder group she is putting together for the Brooklyn, Cowpen, Geneva recovery strategy. 

Your thoughts on the above would be appreciated so I could report it to my Alliance members.

Sincerely,
Jackie Host



Jackie –

The charter you are referring to is for a project to develop a new regional groundwater model for parts of north central Florida, north east Florida and south Georgia.  This is a separate effort from the Prevention/Recovery strategy effort currently underway. 

The stakeholder groups you see listed so far are those who became aware of the project before it was posted on our web site and have expressed interest in participating.  The purpose of posting the charter on the web site is to inform a wider variety of stakeholders of the project and to solicit their involvement should they so desire.

There are three levels of involvement possible for stakeholders: Project Team (any stakeholder interested in the chartering and progress of this project), Steering Team (interested and qualified stakeholders who will provide high-level direction to the Technical Team) and Technical Team (stakeholders with technical expertise in groundwater modeling, hydrogeology, hydrology or related fields).  More detail on the teams is provided in the Definitions section of the draft project charter.

Once the model is developed, we will likely have it peer reviewed by one or two groundwater modeling technical experts not involved in the project.

This new model will not be used to develop the Prevention/Recovery strategies, as model development is expected to be a multi-year effort.  The current version of the District’s Northeast Florida groundwater model (Version 4, NEF) will be used to develop strategies.  Accordingly, development of the new model will not slow down the Prevention/Recovery strategy effort.

Alfred P. Canepa

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