These are not in any order:

1. The regulated parties should have useful and appropriate guidance and calculation tools to make the regulations effective. I can provide example, if requested.
2. Regulations should be meaningful and manageable. (Regulations should not be just paperwork exercises. They should result in positive environmental outcomes. Regulations should not place unreasonable burdens, financial or otherwise, on the regulated parties.)
3. Regulations and the regulatory framework should be understandable to the regulated parties, the regulators, and the public.
4. Equity and fairness -- all individuals, entities, and sectors should carry their appropriate share of the burden to achieve water quality improvement.

Inspection and enforcement should match regulatory responsibilities. (for example - The State has a permit for construction sites that disturb more than one acre. This permit covers thousands of sites all around the state. To make the permitting program credible and effective, the State should have many inspectors visiting sites everywhere. Instead, the program has always been drastically understaffed and the inspections have not happened. The result has been that the permit is ignored in many areas of the state. This lack of staffing, inspections, and enforcement makes the permit toothless and breeds scorn and disrespect for the law.)

5. Minimize regulatory overlap and duplication. (for example -- Wetland authority is handled by multiple local, State and Federal agencies. Property owners get conflicting instructions from different agency staff. This causes confusion and breeds resentment and disrespect for the law.)
6. Address both restoration and protection -- We need to deal with restoring waters that are impaired and protecting waters that are not yet impaired.
7. Funding should match responsibility -- See #5 above. Also, we need to be sure that are funding mechanisms that are sufficient to cover the costs for mandated regulatory responsibilities. We cannot simply pass unfunded mandates to the local level.
8. We need to have sufficient monitoring, data, and research to support good decision-making and regulatory development.
9. Minimize fragmentation, promote coordination
10. We need to balance flexibility with clarity, in regulations. Writing flexibility into regulations can make them vague and confusing. The regulated parties are left wondering what is required of them. Review and rulings by State agencies can be very difficult.
11. We need sufficient staff, at every level, to match regulatory authority and responsibilities.
12. Restoration and implementation tools and understanding must match diagnostic tools. (for example -- Index of Biological Integrity (IBI) is a valuable diagnostic tool are assessing the health of receiving waters. It is different from most of our other diagnostic parameters in that it does not provide much insight into what measures should be taken to improve the situation. If we find a phosphorus water quality exceedance, we know a number of measures to address the problem. We know very little about how to increase the diversity of macroinvertebrates. We should not be listing waters as impaired for IBI until we have a better understanding of the linkages between IBI stressors, measures to address specific stressors, and improving IBI scores.)
13. There should be an elegant way to phrase this concept, but it eludes me right now. We should minimize situations where money is spent on useless BMPs just to meet regulatory requirements. For example, I know of many situations where infiltration BMPs have been built on soils that have so much clay content that infiltration will never occur. These BMPs are built just to get a project permitted. This is waste of money and breeds scorn for the law.

(This was posted by Annie on Randy's behalf)

I love Randy's list! But let me say I think we need to step back for a second and get ourselves organized. We so far have been operating without a clear, strategic plan for our evaluation. And because of that I think we are not all on the same page about what it is we are doing. We've said we want to look at the "governance" of our water management system. And we've made the preliminary judgment that fragmentation is a problem, as reported in the numerous studies done in the past. I'd like to suggest we take some time to define more clearly what aspect of governance and fragmentation we intend to evaluate. Do we mean we want to look at the agency structure and recommend reorganization, do we mean we want to look at the variety of laws related to water and recommend new or revised policies; do we mean we want to look at the relationship between water managers (govt) and water users (public) and recommend new ways of cooperating; or maybe some combination of all of these, or maybe something entirely different? Whatever we do, my preference would be that we try to be systematic about this, which to me means we first have to "describe" as best we can the system we intend to evaluate. So..... any thoughts on this?

Oh, and one more post... here is the link to the web page of the example water vision statement done by the World Water Council. If you download the pdf of Chapter 1: Vision Statement and Key Messages, it's only about three pages long. They also have described the water context in which this vision has emerged, as Lea pointed out as very important. If you care to read it, that's chapter 2. And lastly, they engaged in "scenario-based water futures," a technique similar to the one shared by David Hulse (Larry alerted us to his presentation earlier this week.)
http://www.worldwatercouncil.org/index.php?id=961