The basin overview: a planning tool and a process

The New England River Basins Commission is a federal-state planning partnership established under PL 89-80 to prepare and update plans for managing the water and related land resources of the region's 28 major river basins. Constraints on preparing Level B studies and other comprehensive management plans led the Commission to develop the basin overview program in 1977. A summary report relying on readily available information, each overview provides a comprehensive assessment of water resource demands and problems for a river basin. Overviews are the first step in a process of increasingly detailed planning and management focused on the region's most critical problems. They are often the only planning effort dealing with an entire river basin in a comprehensive manner, a particulary useful role in the region's 16 interstate or international basins. In their development they serve as a vehicle for establishing consensus on problem definitions and next step recommendations. The overview, once approved by NERBC, provides a basis for the annual process through which the Commissions sets its priorities for federally funded water resource programs and projects, allows for a regional water resources problem assessment, and provides individual states with a baseline for Title III programs