The Department of Water Protection was born from a simple and unsettling truth:
the City of Los Angeles owns and manages the vast majority of the Owens Valley floor, and yet the waters, lands, and communities of Payahuunadü continue to bear the cost of that ownership.​ This charter is not only a document — it is a remembering.

It marks the moment when imagination begins to take institutional form, when responsibility is named, and when stewardship is reclaimed as a civic duty. Written in the language of governance and guided by the wisdom of water, this charter establishes the Department of Water Protection as a people-led agency devoted to care, restoration, and accountability.

Here, water is recognized not as a commodity, but as a living relative.
Protection is understood not as regulation alone, but as relationship.
And governance is practiced as an act of listening — to land, to history, and to one another.

Until such time as this Department is formally recognized by law, it exists through participation. Every person who reads this charter, shares it, or acts in its spirit becomes part of its enactment.

We invite you to read slowly.
To listen closely.
And to consider what it might mean to live in right relationship with the waters that sustain us all.