A New Man for a New Era

A somewhat obscure California bureaucrat suddenly has an opportunity to direct national water policy in a bold new direction of sound resource management and environmental protection. He is 44-year-old Dennis Underwood, a civil engineer who has spent the past 11 years on the staff of the Colorado River Board of California, based in downtown Los Angeles. Underwood has been chosen by President Bush to be chief of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that once ruled western water resources with virtually an iron fist as an act of beneficence for powerful senators and congressmen.

Going back to 1902, the bureau had one basic goal: to build mighty dams and to make the western desert and brushlands bloom with the magic of irrigation water sold cheap to the farmers who repeatedly reelected the congressional water giants like California’s Bernie Sisk and Colorado’s Wayne Aspinall. But times have changed. The Sisks and Aspinalls are gone from Congress. All the easy dams have been built. The new cities of the West are competing for the water. A strong environmental ethic has entered the water debate. The political trend is running against any more costly, subsidized irrigation projects.

Sensing this, federal officials formally changed the mission of the Bureau of Reclamation to one of better management of water resources. But the 4,000-person agency has drifted the past half dozen years under weak leadership and with no apparent interest at the White House or Interior Department in the development of a coherent national water policy. Now is the time to write one.

Is Dennis Underwood the man to direct such a conversion? Perhaps. Those who know him credit Underwood with being pleasant, bright and knowledgeable on the issues. Underwood has worked with water officials throughout the Colorado River Basin and with the federal reclamation workers who oversee the Colorado’s operations. But there is some question as to whether he has the political skills and stomach for battling an entrenched reclamation bureaucracy that has been shorn of its glamorous dam-building tradition and uprooted from Washington to Denver in recent years. And there is some question whether Underwood will have the support or mandate for doing so from the Bush Administration.

But Underwood and the Administration now have an unsurpassed opportunity for turning the dispirited bureau into a model of modern water management. The bureau should be given responsibility for developing ground-water management programs to safeguard aquifers that serve both cities and farms. The bureau should work to reverse some of the damage done over the years by reclamation projects, such as contamination caused by irrigation drainage problems throughout the West. The bureau can play an important role in easing the inevitable transition of water supplies from farms to the cities in some areas, and in developing water conservation programs.

Should Underwood and his superiors choose to take such a leadership course, they are certain to have strong support in Congress from the new water leaders like Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) and Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.). Should they fail to rid themselves of the old irrigation-project mentality, they will not find much sympathy. Even California’s San Joaquin Valley no longer has a congressional champion who can be counted on to pass wanted legislation or kill unfavorable regulations with a whisper to a colleague or a phone call to the White House.

The new water age is here. The Bush Administration must decide now whether it will seize a leadership role, or be pulled along by the flow.