Meeting productivity and . have not seen the full model

Tne SFPUC is claiming that 1. I have seen the complete hydrological model. Not so. They say I walked out of a meeting when this model was being explained to me. My questions revealed that the modelers had used a self-serving, self-selected "wet year" to develop a long-term future forecast of 265 MGD. Debate seemed futile. The environment was turning negative and marginal returns on staying there were negative.

I walked out of the forecasting meeting because the presenter was using one wet year to validate 265 MGD as a long-term viable forecast. The presenter did not seem to understand the need for a longer period of historical observations. All the sugar coating of a "representative year" made the presentation further implode and become less viable in my mind. I am not a trial lawyer. I am uncomfortable in that role. I quickly learned the major limitation of this model. It was as I suspected. It is not my job description to teach statistical techniques and further debate an indefensible assumption in what I perceived was not the most receptive environment.

I have never seen the full model as the SFPUC claim. Never! Some years ago, I was given, on request for the model, 50 lines of FORTRAN code as "the model." I asked a computer science friend to validate or invalidate my belief that this code, ASIS, was meaningless. He stated it was meaningless without the necessary parameters being passed from other parts of the model. He also validated my belief that they were "shining" me on.

In frustration, I also presented this FORTRAN code to a senior member of the Mayor's staff and explained in plain English how the missing parameters rendered these limited, unsupported, lines of code worthless. I am sure his recall will be available on request.

Then President of the Commission, Honorable Richard Sklar, circa 2004, asked me to evaluate the end-use demand models. He said these models cost $25MM and he was concerned. He gave me a box of glossy end-use forecasting brochures to review. No code. No algorithm. No model specifications. He asked my opinion.

Simply put - end-use modeling could possibly be a necessary (???) but certainly was not a sufficient condition to bet the future of SF's Hetch Hetchy system. I said I could not validate something without the actual algorithm (code) and doubted its value when it completely ignored price theory.

I gave two volunteer lectures on econometric forecasting to the SFPUC - one at the RBOC and the other at the TWG, plus writing extensively (volunteer) on the subject for Infrastructure Task Force in the 2000-2002 time frame. Now this econometric approach is apparently being implemented.

I guess we need to keep an eye on the ball and shoot the messenger?