1. Central Arizona Water Control Study: CAWCS
Public Administration and Policy
PAD634 Judgment and Decision Making Behavior
Central Arizona Water Control Study: CAWCS
Thomas R. Stewart, Ph.D.
Center for Policy Research
Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy
University at Albany
State University of New York

2. Reference
Brown, C. A. (1984). The Central Arizona water control study: A case for multiojbective planning and public involvement. Water Resources Bulletin, 20(3),
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3. Two major emphases
Multiobjective plan formulation and evaluation (not just evaluation)
Open planning process.
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4. Overview
1. Define study goals and generate potential plan elements (individual actions or structures) that might each partially meet the goals.
2. Screen out plan elements having unacceptable characteristics with respect to a set of critical factors (e.g., unsuitable dam site geology).
3. Combine remaining elements into 10 to 20 systems, or groups of elements that work together to address all goals.
4. Perform preliminary evaluation of systems on all objectives. Screen out poor performers.
5. Perform detailed multiattribute evaluation on remaining set of alternative systems.
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5. Overview
Stage I Define objectives and screen out plan elements that were not technically feasible.
Stage II Evaluate plan elements in more detail and combine them into systems
Stage III Multiattribute evaluation
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6. Stage I
Identify study objectives and potential actions that could achieve these objectives. Preliminary objectives identified by previous studies, the public, and interested agencies were:
1. Water supply
2. Flood control
3. Energy conservation and production
4. Water quality
5. Vegetation and wildlife
6. Recreation
7. Social considerations
8. Cultural resources
9. Preservation of water rights
10. Safety of dams
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7. Stage II
Evaluate plan elements in more detail and combine them into systems
15 systems were developed by combining elements.
Largely a technical task
At the close of Stage II, four public forums were held to present the alternative systems and obtain comments and questions from the public.
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8. Stage III Plans reduced to eight
At the start of Stage III, more detailed evaluations of each system were performed. Some systems were eliminated because a constituent element had been found on further analysis to be prohibitively expensive. The remaining systems were rated on the basis of their performance on the study objectives, and clearly inferior systems were eliminated, i.e., plans were eliminated if they performed more poorly than other plans on most, if not all, objectives. This left eight “candidate” plans that all performed well on many objectives and represented the range of possible kinds of actions. As is standard practice, this group included a “no action” alternative.
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9. Stage III
Attributes
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10. Stage III – Attribute scores for each plan
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11. Stage III – Clustering stakeholder groups based on weights
Representatives from 60 public groups and organizations participated in the process. Representatives assigned “importance weights” to the factors to reflect their own values (i.e., which factor did they consider most important, second in importance, etc.). The group representatives were divided into seven clusters sharing similar views, and a values profile was developed and approved by each cluster. These seven profiles were then used to evaluate the performance of the eight plans as measured on the 14 factors.
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12. Stage III – Stakeholder weights
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13. Stage III – Overall scores
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14. Stage III – Overall scores
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15. Recommendation
Plan 6 – New Waddell
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16. Reasons for success 1. Motivation to Seek a Solution
2. Public Involvement
3. Multi-objective Planning. (plan formulation, not just evaluation)
4. Sufficient Resources Committed
5. Involvement of Key Decision makers
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17. Comparison of Denver handgun ammunition study and CAWCS
In both, controversy resolved by discovering a new alternative
Both involved an element of trust
Both relied on structure and externalization (making things explicit)
Both succeeded despite an inadequate treatment of public values
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18. Postscript: Email from Curt Brown, April 11, 2003
1. Yes, MAU is underutilized.
2. Settings where MAU is allowed to be used are getting rarer. Big resource conflicts are, in my experience, becoming dominated by lawyers, who strongly resist such analyses. My work, with the states of WY, CO, and NE is lawyer-heavy. And, the non-lawyers are pretty high-level pols that also don't want such analyses. (It took five years for this group to agree to an outside facilitator).
3. In many of these conflicts, several participants usually do not really want to make progress. So, endless negotiations are the rule.
4. There are not many people practicing these methods. There is not really an industry-wide "standard" (like engineering methods). So, there is no requirement for them, nor any consensus about how and when to use MAU.
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19. Postscript: Email from Curt Brown, April 11, 2003
5. This means that the impetus for their use must come from within the organization. It takes someone in the agency who has a lot of credibility to sell the idea and carry it through. Even though I developed procedures and computer systems to support this type of application, as soon as I moved on, their use stopped. (Gary and I developed a nice Signal Detection approach to designing warning systems for dams. My agency is moving in a big way to install these systems. But, as soon as I moved on, our TSD approach stopped being used for design.
6. These methods are complicated and have political risks. If someone is not present on a long-term basis to help decision makers get comfortable with them, they die.
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20. Postscript: Email from Curt Brown, April 11, 2003
7. I do think there is a new market for MAU approaches, and that is with folks doing conflict resolution. This field has mushroomed in the last decade, and I have worked with a lot of good folks. Although they tend to be non-technical types, I believe they would see MAU as a useful tool. And, they tend to be working with groups that have already decided that they need help.
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