Who’s in Charge Here?

There is apparent chaos in the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. No one is quite certain how it happened, but the Reagan Administration needs to move quickly to fill a spate of longstanding administrative vacancies with competent officials.

The top job of commissioner has gone unfilled for well over a year, ever since Robert N. Broadbent of Las Vegas was elevated to the post of assistant secretary of Interior for water and science, to oversee several agencies--including Reclamation.

After Broadbent moved up, Robert A. Olson served as acting reclamation commissioner for 18 months, until he resigned on July 31. Olson apparently was told once that he would be appointed commissioner, and decided to leave when he subsequently learned that he would not.

Rumors were rife last spring that the commissioner’s job would be filled soon with either David Houston of the Sacramento regional office or Harold Furman, a former assistant to Sen. Paul Laxalt (R-Nev.). Word now is that a commissioner may be appointed before long, but no one knows who it might be.

The bureau’s ranks were shocked recently when Nelson W. (Bill) Plummer resigned as director of the Lower Colorado Region in Boulder City, Nev. Plummer was told this spring that he would be reassigned to Denver in June. He did not want to go to Denver, and gave up a 25-year career with the bureau rather than be moved.

The attempt to transfer Plummer after less than four years in Boulder City came at a particularly inappropriate time--just before the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Hoover Dam, the keystone of the bureau’s vast reclamation works in the West. Plummer said that he will remain in the Las Vegas area, and in the water business.

Clifford Barrett, who reportedly was transferred from Washington to Salt Lake City against his wishes in 1981, has been called back to Washington to serve as acting commissioner. At least two assistant commissioner jobs also are vacant. One Washington insider says that a clique of Broadbent political proteges has attempted to run the bureau in Jim Watt fashion, without the benefit of the institutional memory of old bureau hands. “The bureau is a shambles,” this source said.

Environmentalists who often deride the agency by calling it the Bureau of Wrecklamation probably would be delighted to see it paralyzed by depleted ranks and the inability to make decisions. But the bureau is too important to Western water interests to allow this situation to be tolerated any longer.