Thank you for that generous introduction. Welcome.

We gather this morning to reassert our commitment to reforming our state's water laws. We gather in common cause-with a shared understanding, and hopefully a shared faith-that the economic and environmental health of our state hinges on implementing meaningful reform of our state's water laws in this next legislative session.

Period.

With the legislature, we resolve to meet the needs of a swelling population and a thriving economy statewide; we commit to meeting the needs of fish and healthy watersheds; and we determine to advance these two principles together, incrementally, over the next several years.

These shared principles are a touchstone, underlining every initiative and defining every outcome principles that affirm the needs of both people and fish.

So let me state clearly this morning, that water reform is a key priority for me. Over the next three years, I'm committed to seeing it through with the help, influence, and dedication of all of you.

Of course, water reform isn't as simple as fishing for salmon in the Snohomish River.

Mark Twain captured the obstacles that lay ahead when he wrote (more than a century ago), 'whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting!"

Indeed, these are tough, complicated issues, issues exacerbated by a short legislative session, a divided House of Representatives, a lack of funding for all our priorities, and a pending election season.

We're also striving to find common ground and recognize the relationships between urban and rural, agriculture and high-tech, and a growing population on both sides of the Cascades.

No one said it would be easy, particularly with so much at stake. But together we can meet the challenge. And we accept this challenge together, not because it's easy, but because it's hard, to paraphrase President Kennedy. We accept it because we quite frankly don't have any more time left. The economic and environmental health of our state requires that we accept our responsibility and address these issues. We accept it and we commit to making it happen; and, working together, we will make it happen.

Policy making doesn't operate in a vacuum. I'm grateful to everyone participating today, and the members of our Joint Executive-Legislative Policy Group in particular. Thank you for accepting the risks, for seizing the reins, and for committing your time and energy to something so critical to the future of the Pacific Northwest.

Working together, we're going to make these next steps in water reform a reality and-if life is at all fair-you will receive the credit. So thank you to Senators Fraser, Regala, Morton, and Honeyford; to Reps. Linville, Kirby, Gary Chandler and Bruce Chandler; and to the members of my team, Top Fitzsimmons, Curt Smitch, and Jim Waldo. Your leadership last session led to the first major reforms of our water law in over a quarter century. I appreciate all that you have done and all that you continue to do.

How strange that here we sit, in so many ways leading the New West economically and socially, while remaining rooted to a web of redundant and impractical water laws.

Laws that are wasteful and unproductive. Laws that date back to 1873!

During my State of the State address last January, I noted that these laws are not in concert with present reality. They don't meet the needs of a state whose population has grown fivefold. A state that is trying to recover wild salmon, to sustain agriculture, and to produce power necessary to support our growing economy.

So together with leaders from the House and the Senate, our water team helped pass Engrossed Substitute House Bill 1832, the most substantial changes of our water laws in thirty years in our state!

We all recognize that effective policy making is a craft, not unlike building a home. With the accomplishments of this last session we've now poured our foundation, but we still need to lay the floor joists, frame the walls, and raise the roof.

Working together, we've developed four, interdependent topics for the 2002 session. They include 1) setting and achieving instream flows (in other words, water for fish) 2) finding water for growing communities 3) fixing 'use it or lose it' policies (sometimes called 'relinquishment.') and 4) identifying funding for water storage, water delivery, and safe drinking water systems.

We need to make progress in each of these four areas in the next session. We need to make progress because achievement of one requires achievement of the others is linked to the other.

We know, for example, that how we address water for growing communities will determine how we tackle the challenges of instream flows for fish. And we know, for example, that to achieve our goals for people and for fish we need both water storage and water conservation.

Working together, we won't approach water reform subjectively, from a special-interest angle, blind to its ripple effect. Rather, we will embrace a broad, systems approach, one that acknowledges our interdependence. Simply put, we embrace principles that affirm the needs of both people and fish.

All of us are committing time-as members of the legislature, my administration, stakeholders, tribal members, and private citizens-to breathing life into a multiyear, disciplined approach to water reform. Today we step beyond simply acknowledging the obvious: That water is the lifeblood of the American West.; that water defines us. Today we begin the work of identifying and implementing real solutions.

Aridity is the defining characteristic of the West. Those of us living on the Westside of Washington state -the rain-forested, mildewed edge of our continent-sometimes lose sight of our dry and diverse and changing landscape. But we can't. The decisions we make today will literally determine the size and growth of our communities, the health of fish in our watersheds, and the sustainability and scope of our agricultural sector.

During the Cold War, one of our state's national lawmakers made famous the phrase that 'in matters of national security, the best politics is no politics." We modify that phrase today, to say that in matters of water reform-with so much at stake for farmers, for fish, for people, for the whole of the Pacific Northwest-that the best politics is no politics.

Thank you for participating today and good luck to all of us.

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