Governing the Water Use in the Greater Richmond Area: Dispute and Resolution

Abstract

This study probes into the governing issues centering around the water use dispute and resolution between Richmond City and Henrico County in the Greater Richmond area, Virginia. For a variety of reasons, Richmond City strongly opposed the initiative by Henrico County to construct and operate its own water treatment plant in 1987. As a result of rigorous multi-party planning, mediation, and negotiation processes, Richmond City and Henrico County finally reached a compromise settlement in 1994. This study concludes that mediating and resolving public policy disputes between localities within the metropolitan area is a highly complicated and politically charged process, which can involve different levels of government, business community elites, and other stakeholders; driven by their common interests, the public-private intersectoral boundaries are increasingly blurred; and a planning process blends both political and technical factors together. In this case, the Henrico County's newly proposed water treatment plant project was environmentally cleared by the Water Review Panel's technical report.

Keywords:

• County
• city
• water
• governing

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, September 2–5, 2004. We wish to thank Timothy Conlan for his perceptive comments, which we have largely incorporated into our revised version.

Notes

¹Material in this section is heavily drawn from Wikstrom, N. (2003). County manager government in Henrico County: implementation, evolution, and evaluation. Richmond, VA: Henrico County, (pp. 167–176).

²For an excellent work focusing on mediating disputes between localities, see Susskind L., & Cruikshank, J. (1987). Breaking the impasse: consensual approaches to resolving public disputes. New York: Basic Books.

³Under Virginia's adhered-to-doctrine of city-county separation, cities are not located within a county, but enjoy independent legal status. Urban counties, in particular, provide virtually all the same services as the cities of the Commonwealth.