FSLVW Updated and Expanded Mission Statement
July, 2023
Friends of San Lorenzo Valley Water (FSLVW) is a citizens’ group that strives to promote the best interests of our local community in all water-related matters by serving as a resource for information and analysis. This mission has three key components:
Our top priority is to promote community awareness and accurate understanding of the issues facing the SLVWD.
This awareness and understanding are essential for SLVWD to serve the SLV as effectively as possible because SLV residents interact with SLVWD both as customers and as decision-making voters.
Our group remains officially neutral in all elections because we are committed to establishing positive working relationships with whoever is elected.
We maintain a website and a newsletter. We also sometimes submit documents to the Board and publish articles in local papers. Lastly, we sometimes serve as a conduit for relevant exchanges of information between our community and other local governmental and non-governmental agencies.
Our second priority is to ensure that SLVWD is doing the best possible job of providing safe, reliable, and affordable water to all of its customers.
“Safe and reliable” means not only that SLVWD is meeting all governmental requirements but that it is actively managing our watershed in our collective long-term best interest.
“Affordable" means that SLVWD has a plan both for economically upgrading its infrastructure to minimize ongoing operating costs and for subsidizing those customers who have the least ability to cope with higher rates, while ensuring that SLVWD’s rates, together with grants and other revenue, are sufficient to provide safe and reliable water. It also means that SLVWD is successfully generating public support for these plans.
Our commitment to this priority sometimes leads us to directly advocate for specific policies.
Our third priority is to promote ongoing attentiveness to the broader responsibilities of local environmental stewardship.
Modern nature conservation is about participating effectively in regional planning and management of both the surface and groundwater components of our watershed in order to devise feasible solutions that serve our collective needs in a reliably sustainable way.
FSLVW actively monitors SLVWD’s commitment to environmental stewardship. We also sometimes lend our support to SLV environmental initiatives that do not directly involve SLVWD.