“We need to start a statewide dialogue on water,” said Dave Wenger, the Thursday keynote speaker at the AquAlliance Water Conference, which continues Friday at Sierra Nevada Brewery. California needs high-level discussions about overall water problems, rather than solutions that target only specific areas of the state, he continued. Those solutions are going to cost money, whether that means investing in levees, fish screens, new pumping stations or removal of infrastructure, he said. Wenger worked for 20 years for the Bureau of Reclamation in the early 1970s, as the “token environmentalist,” he told the group of about 60 Thursday afternoon.