Women and other changes in water

Women in water? Younger people with voices? Doug Kemper has seen those and other changes during his 40 years in Colorado water

by Allen Best

Women will be among the attendees at the Colorado Water Congress annual summer conference this week, and relatively speaking, lots of them.

It wasn’t always so, says Doug Kemper, the executive director for the organization, Colorado’s largest group dedicated to convening discussions about water issues.

Kemper, who is moving on in September after 20 years managing the Water Congress, recalls that when he got involved in Colorado water matters about 40 years ago, water meetings were very different. Young people were expected to sit in the back and listen, to pay their dues.

“It wasn’t 100%, but the feeling was that you sit in the back and go along for the ride.”

Water Congress – and by extension all water matters in Colorado – have become more intergenerational. And more diverse in gender.

“You see a much higher percentage of women, and that just makes for a better (water) community. We are not where we need to be yet. But those are the two big changes in the makeup of the water community in the last 20 to 30 years, and especially in the last 10.”

Also evident, at least in the agenda for Water Congress conferences in the last few years, has been the inclusion of native voices – including native women. This summer’s conference in Colorado Springs is no exception. In addition to sessions devoted to agriculture, the Colorado River and other topics, a half-hour is allotted to comments from representatives of both the Southern Ute and the Ute Mountain Ute tribes. Both speakers will be women.

And yet another change, which can also be seen in the agenda for Water Congress but elsewhere, too, is the proliferation of locally based watershed groups.

Kemper grew up primarily in Atlanta, and got his first college degree in Nashville before making his way to Colorado. Part of his motivation was the Colorado River. In a freshman class he had heard an explanation about the Colorado River Compact that stuck with him.

“We were being told in 1973 – 51 years ago — that out West, they have these seven states that share the Colorado River, and you know what they did? They have allocated more water from the river than there is river.”

Kemper remembers thinking, “What an interesting problem.”

The headwaters of the Colorado River lies along the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park. Photo/Allen Best Top photo Doug Kemper near his home in Denver. Photo/Jill PIatt Kemper

Engineers are attracted to problems, he says. “Not that I thought I had the solution. But I was fascinated by the problem.”

By late 1980, with a degree in environmental and water resources engineering, he was in Colorado. (He later picked up a master’s in civil engineering and water resources from the University of Colorado-Boulder).

At the Colorado Air Pollution Control Division, working on problems that are familiar yet today: ozone and particulates. But his greater interest was in water, and so he then worked for a variety of smaller consulting firms, working on everything from uranium mining to a job in Longmont that led to a deeper understanding of the conversion of water from agriculture to urban uses.

By 1986, he was ready for a new challenge. He got hired by Aurora and eventually became the manager of water resources, a position that he held until 2005, when he left to oversee the Colorado Water Congress.

Even when he started that position, Aurora was getting water from three different river basins in Colorado: The South Platte, the Arkansas and the Colorado.

Aurora, working with Colorado Springs, wanted to expand its diversions from the Colorado River Basin through a project in the Eagle River Basin, near Vail, called Homestake II.

The project, as proposed, was scuttled in the early 1990s, and it remains unclear whether any of that water will ever get diverted.

In 1992, Denver and other Front Range water providers also were sent reeling when the Environmental Protection Agency refused to issue a permit vital for a giant diversion project called Two Forks. It would have enlarged diversions from Summit County – and even from the Vail area.

From his Aurora Water office Kemper saw this and thought, “You know, we have to change our whole approach to water resources, at least in the cities.”

He obtained training, at Harvard and elsewhere, on collaborative problem solving and consent building. The task: learn how to work with people in a high-conflict environment. That, says Kemper, defined the rest of his career — although, he adds, the us vs. them that dominated water thinking 50 to 75 years ago may not be entirely gone. “We may be coming back to that now.”

Aurora has gone from a typical Front Range city, intent upon recreating landscapes from the Midwest or East, to one that aggressively promotes low-water landscapes. One educational tool is a demonstration garden near the municipal building. Photo/Allen Best

Aurora, founded in 1891, began as a farming community. The population rapidly expanded from 11,000 in 1950 to 222,000 in 1990, when Kemper was trying to figure out where the water was to come from. (It is now 400,000).

That was the era of big projects. Homestake and Two Forks were big, big projects. Their defeat forced cities to look at transfers from agriculture in Eastern Colorado and in smaller, more incremental ways.

Something else also happened: water conservation. Per capita water use in the 20^th century had been rising, in the case of Aurora from 110 gallons daily per capita in the mid-1950s to 180 gallons per capita by the 1980s.

During the last several decades, that per-capita growth flattened and then declined. Aurora’s water use per capita is now at 115 gallons per day.

We have low-water toilets and washing machines, but also new urban landscapes. Cities are also rising vertical. The denser housing reduces the amount of water devoted to front yards and backyards.

Front Range cities have grown considerably but in the last 20 years without necessarily expanding water supplies.

Concurrent with this change has been a revised attitude about water supplies in Colorado. Early in Kemper’s career, it was a mantra that Colorado had at least a half-million acre-feet of water on the Western Slope to develop.

Any lingering thoughts in that regard have largely been shelved by the drought of the 21^st century coupled with the aridification caused by a warming climate. Transmountain projects are expensive – and will the water even be there?

Windy Gap reservoir, Northern Water photo

Long-time Western Slope water activist Ken Neubecker credits Northern Water with taking local and envirornmental concerns seriously, in its project to enlarge diversions from Windy Gap, but he also says that Doug Kemper was a pioneer in the art of listening. Photo/Norhern Water

Ken Neubecker credits Kemper with being a “pioneer in the changing of the guard.” He points to the attitudes of Denver Water in the 1960s and 1970s. He summarizes the attitude of at least one chief executive of Denver water during that time as being: “We have the water rights, we have more money than you, and we will see you in court.”

Neubecker, a Glenwood Springs-area resident who was a long-term representative for American Rivers, says that Denver retained elements of this attitude even after it lost in the Two Forks battle.

Other water diverters over time had become more willing to have discussions, to take the problems of the Western Slope interest and the environmental community more seriously. He credits in particular the wok of Northern Water.

Denver Water, though, didn’t entirely shift until another Western Slope resident, Jim Lochhead, was hired to oversee the agency.

Neubecker says that Kemper dramatically changed Water Congress. “Not overnight, but he shifted the organization’s thinking into greater inclusivity, the idea that ‘we’re in all in this together,’” he said. “And my position also changed,” he added, from “‘Hell no, not one more drop,’ to ‘We can work together. And the Front Range can still get some of the water. It just depends upon how we do it.’”

As for Kemper’s plans after leaving the Water Congress in September, he says he has deliberately chosen to have none. “I have never taken more than two weeks off literally from the time I was in 10^th grade, So, right now, I am trying not to have any commitments. I’ll just let things happen.”

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