Associates

Ariel Ambruster

Ariel Ambruster is an assistant facilitator for several of the Center's Bay Area projects in the areas of environmental planning and water resources policy.  Projects include the South San Francisco Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, the Bay Area Water Forum, the San Francisco Bay Area Water Trail and Alameda County's Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area Scientific Review Committee.  She facilitates the Forum's Water and Land Use Committee and is developing the Water Trail's education, outreach and stewardship plan.  She produced the Center working paper “Collaborative Versus Technocratic Policymaking: California's Statewide Water Plan" as her thesis for a Masters degree at the University of California, Berkeley in City and Regional Planning with a concentration in Environmental Planning.  She received the degree in 2007.  The paper compares the collaborative 2005 Water Plan Update to the previous 1998 version, which was developed through a more traditional agency-driven process.  Ariel has presented her research findings at national conferences hosted by the American Political Science Association and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as well as the California state conference of the American Planning Association.

Ariel has fourteen years of experience as a newspaper reporter. At the Contra Costa Times, she wrote about city, county and regional land-use and governance issues, covering diverse topics including landfill crises, school finance structural problems, and conflicts over oil refinery environmental regulation.  Before completing coursework at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, Ariel graduated with highest honors from California State University Long Beach with a B.A. in Political Science, specialization in International Relations.