Afterword
Two Decades at a Western Water Utility
Some Reflections, Observations, and Occasional Insights††††††††
†††††††† A talk given at a meeting of the Colorado Yale Association at The Fort Restaurant in Morrison, Colorado, March 28, 2010
Being the manager of a large municipal water utility is no way for an adult to make a living. It is to hold a mid-nineteenth century water development and natural resource exploitation position while encased in an early twenty-first-century regulatory straightjacket tailored by federal, state, and local governments. Every group with an interest in water, development, or the environment takes a keen interest in making certain that you make no mistakes. But there are a few lucid moments, crystalline experiences, and watershed events that define the truth beyond and lay bare the essence of it all. I have had many of these moments. They were all events of profound and brilliant failure, but string these glistening moments of defeat into a strand and you have the pearls of an administrative career. Let me describe a few of these moments and distill from them whatever wisdom lies therein.
1. Our water future is a lot more uncertain than it used to be.
Planning has always been a critical but unseen component of any large water utility operation. As long as water comes out of a faucet when open, no one thinks about where it comes from or whether the supply is sufficient. But the utility has to think about it. Planning for water utilities has changed enormously in the last ten years and it will continue to change because of changes in demographics, economics, and because of global climate change. The paradigms for water planning are changing. As some recent pundit noted, “When changing paradigms, be sure to put in the clutch.”
Chips Barry standing behind a waterwheel in 2003. In the last decade of the twentieth century, he became the face of Denver Water.
In the past, water planning was a comparatively simple exercise of matching the supply of water with the expected demand for it. To determine future demand, you examined the past five years of usage, assumed no change in the pattern or timing of use or in the weather, and multiplied that usage by a percentage (typically 1 or 2 percent) that reflected the population growth in your area. The formula on the supply side was similar—determine what your water rights would yield on the average or on a dry-year basis. If supplies were sufficient, you were fine; if not purchase some more water or build some new storage or both.
Although this planning methodology may still work in some locations, to many of us in the West it seems hopelessly outdated and naive. In the first place we no longer just “determine” demand; we make a very concerted effort to manage it. We have succeeded in reducing demand in Denver by about 20 percent in the last eight years and believe there is more that can be done without adversely affecting any customer’s quality of life. But unmanaged demand is more easily predicted than managed demand. Plus, what effect will global climate change have on the demand for water? How effective will be our efforts to manage that demand? Figuring out how much customers actually will demand is a good deal more uncertain than it was in the past.
Determinations of future water supply are equally difficult. We know the climate is warming and we can probably predict with some accuracy the range of future ambient temperature in Colorado. The hard part is that no one can predict what happens to precipitation in the central Rocky Mountain area. The best guess now is that precipitation will be much more variable than before. As Yogi Berra once said, “The future just ain’t what it used to be.” The past hydrologic record was a superb indication of what the range of future precipitation would be. It is still the best indication, but it seems to be a lot less reliable than before.
For many, the answer to uncertainty is often to get more data, which allegedly will enable a better decision. However, with respect to both water supply and water demand, more data will not necessarily be of much help. The uncertainties will remain, and water planners must instead grapple with how much risk is tolerable and how much reliability is required. In the end, we are left with yet another Yogi Berra quote: “Forecasting is a difficult thing to do, especially if you are talking about the future.”
2. Policies often have unintended consequences, and no good deed goes unpunished.
My example in this case comes from early years at the Denver Water Department where I was determined to put in place a new policy affecting all employees. The new doctrine was that I would maintain an open-door policy. The reaction to this pronouncement was quite something.‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ Readers should be advised that the story that follows is a parable or fable; while it conveys a certain truth, appraising its accuracy is emphatically not the point.—Ed.
The carpenter shop sent word back via the maintenance section that they were sure the door worked properly and if I had any complaints I should send them down through three layers of supervisors to the carpenter shop. Employees began to appear at the outer fringe of my office, but not to enter, only to peer in, and assure themselves that the door was in fact open. A few employees actually entered the office and announced that they were there pursuant to the open-door policy. However, the policy was so novel that they didn’t know who was to speak or what business was to be conducted. Three supervisors asked whether they could station a monitor outside my office to find out who was utilizing the open-door policy. Rumors circulated that the manager was going to reduce staff by 30 percent, and that the first three hundred people through the open door would get the ax. Facilities management wanted to know whether I needed the carpet repaired because of all the traffic from the open-door policy, and the board wanted to know how I could get any work done if all I was doing was talking to employees. The real estate speculators from northern Douglas County viewed my open-door policy as an invitation to advocate that Denver provide them water from its “hoarded” supplies. The Grand Junction Sentinel ran an editorial suggesting that the open door should be used as an escape device for all the west slope water that Denver has been holding hostage for fifty years. The suburban proponents of Two Forks threatened suit if they were charged for the manager’s time during open-door meetings but wanted copies of any notes of meetings with employees if Two Forks was the subject discussed. Westword suggested that reform was long overdue at the water department and these major policy shifts were certainly indication that change was under way. The Denver Post on the other hand opined that too rapid change led to a destabilized institution, without direction, focus, or accountability. One local pundit linked the open-door policy to the forthcoming baseball season while another wondered in print if I was running for office.
As I have said, policies can lead to unintended consequences, and no good deed goes unpunished.
3. Colorado water law is almost always counterintuitive, and at its worst it is byzantine.
A few illustrations:
4. We have unfortunately politicized hydrology, and we will regret it.
In hydrologic terms, hydrology is becoming a tributary of politics. Politicizing something means using an otherwise noncontroversial event or occurrence to further a political agenda. I see that occurring in a variety of areas, and I am distressed by it. Dr. Kevorkian has politicized death, and the abortion and antiabortion forces continually challenge each other on the rapidly developing politics of abortion. Genetic research has now been politicized, and we now see the same tendency with respect to believers and nonbelievers of global climate change.
There is ample evidence that both El Niño and global warming are a fact. Both have dramatic short-term and long-term effects on climate, rainfall, and freshwater distribution. It is unclear whether there is a connection between global warming and El Niño occurrences. Does global warming cause El Niño? Does El Niño exacerbate global warming? Many think they know and see their political opportunity in advocacy of their answer. Both global warming and El Niño have occurred in the past. The critical question is whether human activity is making El Niño and/or global warming worse. Many believe that mankind is wholly or partially responsible for these events. To the extent that this allegation is believed, we will have succeeded in making hydrology a political issue. If the world believes that human activity causes El Niño with subsequent weather dislocations, storms, floods, droughts, mudslides, etc. and that human activity drives significant increases in the rate of global warming, then the efforts to alter human behavior in response to this occurrence will, without question, result in political pressure on the field of hydrology. Presumably there was a time when hydrology was pure science, when no political judgments were involved in determining how much water was flowing, how much groundwater was in reserve, or what the relationship was between the two. However, if politicians now believe they must have a stake in altering human behavior because of their concerns about climate, the questions about water availability, water flow, groundwater, etc. will be manipulated and used to serve an agenda that is either directed at limiting human activity or an agenda that is directed at allowing it to continue relatively unfettered. In this setting, hydrologic data is no longer neutral; it becomes a weapon for use by one side or another in the battle over the extent of allowable human activity. I see this in the debates about flow in both the Colorado and the South Platte Rivers. Conclusions about how much water is in the river, and how much water should be in the river, are coming to depend more on your belief about agriculture, development, and water diversion, than on hydrologic data. We’ve now reached the point where contending sides hire their own psychologists, accountants, and doctors, each of whom is expected to present testimony or a report supporting the point of view of the party who has paid the expert. I don’t look forward to the day when we also have forensic hydrology and each side in an important water issue hires a hydrologist who will be expected to present a particular point of view that furthers the political agenda of the proponent. Yet, that is where we are going.
5. Water conservation is a surprisingly complicated subject, and it is not the answer to every water question.
For many, water conservation seems like a simple topic and an obvious good. Use less of the resource and you will not waste it. The more conservation you can do, the better off you are. Alas, it is not so simple. The first question that must be asked by water utilities—what are you doing with water saved? If you are selling it for future growth rather than developing new supplies or building a new reservoir, it means one thing. If you are saving it in a reservoir in case the current drought lasts longer, it is another thing entirely.
Some conservation measures are designed to be temporary in nature simply to allow the utility and its customers to get through a current drought. The behavior called for is not expected to continue longer than the drought. Other conservation measures are designed to permanently alter behavior or change the hardware involved with water use. Permanent conservation measures give the utility a choice of whether to sell its conserved water for future growth, save it in a reservoir, or leave it in a stream.
Drought-response measures may in fact be viewed by customers as something of a sacrifice, and they are certainly viewed by the utility as temporary. A utility would be foolish to sell water conserved as a drought measure for future growth. However, if the utility sells all the water conserved by customers pursuant to a permanent water conservation program, they are subject to demand hardening. This means that conservation savings in a future drought will be difficult. If the utility serves two thousand people with the water previously used to serve one thousand, it looks like a great victory. When the next drought hits, the utility will ask customers to cut back by 30 or 40 percent more. They may not be able to do so, or they will find doing so extremely difficult, and the utility would have succeeded only in hardening the demand. The flexibility previously available to the utility to deal with a drought is gone.
At the end of the day, all utilities must analyze conservation measures to understand their cost, their yield in acre-feet saved per dollar expended, and their effect on the customer, in the operational capability and flexibility of the utility, and on downstream owners of water rights generated by return flows.
There are many who believe that the answer to any water supply dilemma in the United States is more conservation. However, it is not that simple.
6. Water lawyers and the environmental community, although always professing to help, make the job of a water utility manager infinitely more complicated and frustrating.
The environmental community, of course, is not of one mind on any subject, and so characterizing them all in a sentence or two is not legitimate. But I do recall a meeting a few months ago with a statewide community-based self-selected group called the Standing Committee on Environmental and Water Interests. This committee is a special interest group that convenes to pursue a particular environmental interest if there is no preexisting special interest group empowered to pursue that interest. It monitors public utterances on water use, pharmaceuticals in drinking water, forest fires and watersheds, water conservation, low-flush toilets, and development plans in order to see who might be offended, and then it takes offense if no one else has the time or inclination. It watches water and utility power structures and petitions for redress, regulatory enforcement, minimum stream flow, basin of origin protection, and other assorted good causes. It is an extraordinarily hard-working group, never at rest, always vigilant. Recently—and listen to this list—the committee has taken up the cause of the inequality of water distribution among the western states, the preservation of sagebrush in western Colorado, the conversion of all Forest Service land to national parks, the abolition of smoking in football stadiums, the establishment of causal connection between lawn irrigation and global warming, the proliferation of phreatophytes, and the application of integrated-resources planning techniques to global overpopulation. They wanted to know what I was going to do to further their cause.
The water lawyers are of course a different group entirely. Some water lawyers also believe they are environmentalists, although they must not have examined closely how many trees have been cut down to further their complex conditional clauses, subparagraphs, and footnotes. The Colorado River Compact was written in 1922 and it is one of the most important documents affecting any water user taking water from the Colorado River or its tributaries. The compact is about ten pages long. I hesitate to think how long it would be or how many years it would have taken to negotiate had the current stable of Colorado water lawyers been involved in its negotiation. The ten-page document would be at least six hundred pages in length, but it would not be more clear than the ten-page version. This imagined effort by the water lawyers to solve every conceivable condition or consequence of water flow or water use along the Colorado River for the next hundred years would spawn a dozen or more subsidiary questions, each leading to further paragraphs and subparagraphs of “clarifying” language. At the end of the day we should be able to rely on common sense, good faith, and mutually agreed upon intentions. In the water world that I occupy, that seldom now seems to be the case, and simple documents take years to negotiate and forests of trees for the paper to print them on.
7. The water world has been taken over by the computer geeks, here as much as elsewhere in the world.
It is a good thing, as manager of a water utility, that I don’t have to know a lot about the interaction between computer models, hydrology, water-treatment plants, and customer bills. As far as computers are concerned, I thought a window was something that you had to clean and that memory was something you lost with age. I’ve always believed that if you had a three-and-a-half-inch floppy, you hoped that nobody found out about it, and that backup was something you worried about in your wastewater system. As far as I know, a cursor uses profanity and a keyboard is part of a musical instrument.
8. Most of the world does not understand that water is not a finite resource, and that we are not “using it up.”
Water is not like gasoline, or coal, or—God forbid—oil. Water is a renewable resource. The hydrologic cycle is what makes it so. Turning off the water while you brush your teeth does not save water from disappearing forever into outer space but simply means the utility will not have to capture and treat a couple of extra gallons of water for you that day. If you do “waste” those few gallons, an entity downstream will get them eventually, and their use or a subsequent use will put the water into the hydrologic cycle, where it will eventually return as rain or snow somewhere. In the end, water conservation is not about waste, but about efficiency, and about understanding that the benefits of water conservation are all local and not global.
Most of the public is ignorant of some of the basics about water, water supply, the hydrologic cycle, the cost and techniques of water treatment, etc. In this part of the world, obtaining the water to put in your faucet is an engineering, legal, and political feat of some complication. When I explain to people that they can save some water by flushing their toilet with a bucket, many ask, “How do I get the water into the tank?” I have found that 40 percent of the public in Colorado does not know that pouring a bucket of water into the toilet bowl will make it flush. Let’s start our water education with that thought, and finish this talk with it as well.