Public Attitudes About Water Quality in the HUA

The Idaho Snake-Payette Rivers Hydrologic Unit Area (HUA) Water Quality Project was one of 74 projects funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture implemented in the 1990s to protect and improve water quality. One of the goals of this three-phase, eight-year project was to identify southwestern Idaho perceptions and priorities about water issues to improve public policy and programming. This 1999 bulletin reports the findings, including the degree of citizens' awareness about water-quality issues; their literacy about drinking-water contaminants; the public's views on agriculture's water-quality impacts; the most popular sources they relied on for information; and whether or not the program had increased the public's awareness of best management practices. This report is likely most helpful to Extension educators and others who similarly grapple with the ongoing challenges of designing effective public programming.