To accomplish this goal without regulatory or enforcement authority, TVA is placing River Action Teams in each of the Tennessee River's 12 major subwatersheds. These teams are responsible for assessing resource conditions and building partnerships to address protection and improvement needs. River Action Teams CWI represents a transformation of TVA's water management organization from a hierarchy organized around technical disciplines to a dynamic organization based upon cross-functional teams. RATs serve specific watersheds, enabling them to address the causes rather than just the symptoms of pollution impacts and to coordinate efforts across political boundaries. Assigning teams to a geographical area for the long-term also allows the teams to gain a better understanding of resource conditions, builds community trust, and enhances the development of cooperative relationships with stakeholders.
RATs are self-managed.
They are empowered to decide how to focus resources and address protection and improvement needs, allowing a rapid response to evolving or newly discovered problems and opportunities. Outcome measures for fiscal year 1996 focus on increasing the number of hydrologic units meeting beneficial uses and decreasing the level of TVA resources in targeted hydrologic units. A distinguishing feature of TVA's Clean Water Initiative is the use of monitoring data rather than suppositions to guide watershed protection and improvement activities. River Action Teams start by assessing the status of individual streams and rivers in their watersheds, including ecological health and land use. They take a comprehensive inventory of the aquatic resources in major streams and rate each stream's health compared to what it would be like if it were in an undisturbed, or pristine, condition.