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l.,.o I....' ; U good at telling you what they want, but if you are going to arrange trades between people, you have to listen not only to what they want, but why they want it. A good analyst's job is to try to help people find common ground and develop tools that will exploit that com. man ground. As an example, on the Stanislaus River in California, a dispute arose over fisheries flows downstream of the reservoir. When the reservoir was built, the Fish and Wildlife Service had agreed to cer- tain minimum flows in the river. After it was built, they decided those flows were insufficient to maintain fish and wildlife and came hack with a request for flow which would actually empty the reservoir- thoroughly and completely. No water at all left for the purposes for which the reservoir was built. But if you listen to what the fisheries people really needed, they didn't need that low flow every year, they didn't need that amount of water every year, they needed it most years. So we wrote a rule which, in fact, delivered water to the fishery based on the forecasted inflow and the reservoir's storage in the spring. That turned out to give the Fish and Wildlife Service everything they wanted about 65% of the time and an intermediate flow most of the rest of the time. Really bad drought flows Occur with about the same frequency that you saw on the Atlanta graph, maybe twice in the historical record. It also had virtually no impact on the reservoir. So by listening to what people really need and not what they say they need, like what the Fish and Wi]d- life Service said they needed was an absolute minimum flow, you can often resolve disputes with what's in- volved. Finally, you have to involve people in making de- cisions. I want to quickly describe two techniques that I have used with success for doing exactly that. The first is called gaming. Gaming is actually an operator's dream. Gaming allows the operator to say to somebody who is t.elling him how to operate the system, "Here, you do it," without the actual impacts of having people destroyed on the river. In fact, it's a simulation mode] where there is a built-in rule. People run that rule, but when they don't like what's happening, can change it on an ad hoc basic. Usually these games involve a lot of people sitting around a room negotiating what they want to do on an ad hoc basis. The use of gaming is most interesting. It does a number of things for you. First, hy having everyone in the room talking about what they need from the system, gaming allows all parties to see and understand what their problems are. This allows them to figure out among themselves what the potential tradeoffs are. Gaming can demonstrate the importance of operations. When you have people trying to make operational decisions, they realize just how diffieult it is to deal with the uncertainty in the system and what's involved in making operational de- cisions. Gaming helps estahlish objectives. This is im- portant not anly far the peaple wha play the game, but it's important for the people who run the system. Because if they have a better understanding of what the objectives are, when they have to make policy de- cisions, they can do a better joh. Gaming can dem- onstrate opportunities for cooperation. This was certainly the case i.n the game we ran on the Kansas River Basin. where a number of inde- pendent parties got together to try to solve their prob- lems by joint operation in the middle of a game. Gaming builds an understanding of the system so it gives all of the participants a basis for negotiation. Finally, gaming can force officials to consider prob- lems before they actually oecur, which is imperative if policymaking on operations is to occur in policy- making shops. That is, in the Congress or in the State governments. One more technique before I leave you, and that is computer aided negotiations. Once everyone under- stands what's involved i~ making decisions in advance, one can build simulation models that actually do that and produce long term traces such as the ones I showed you from Atlallta. By comparing those long term traces sitting around a table, it is possible for people to negotiate solutions to problems which work over the long haul and try to operate the systems to optim- ize their performance, again, over tbe long hauL I hope I have succeeded in giving you my perspeetive of why things happen the way they do and what's hap- pening in the policymaking aspects of operating res- ervoirs. I hope I have told you that it's important, in that most of the benefits to be gotten from river basins now can be gotten from changing operations. Even more so than by building new facilities. I hope I have illuminated or illustrated to you some of the tech- niques that can be used to get people actively involved in making river basin operations accessible to the pub- lic and to letting people have direct input into tbe development of operating schemes for reservoirs. Thank you very much. 9