Back to Winter 2012 Newsletter
By Stephan Przybylowicz, WRRC Graduate Assistant Outreach
The following is an interview with Tom Buschatzke, Assistant Director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR). Mr. Buschatzke presented a Brown Bag seminar at the WRRC on December 9, 2011 about the future of ADWR, which was attended by more than 40 people. For more information about Brown Bag seminars visit https://wrrc.arizona.edu/events/brownbag.
Stephan Przybylowicz: What is your role in your new position as Assistant Director of ADWR?
Tom Buschatzke: I’m in charge of several sections at ADWR: Colorado River, Statewide Planning and Tribal Liason, Active Management Area Data, Active Management Area Director—which is more planning and outreach—and the Assured/Adequate and Recharge Permitting Programs. Those programs really fit together because there are a lot of policy implications and a lot of planning pieces in those programs. So, it’s a way to combine those together so that hopefully on a statewide basis, there will be better coordination in the policy and planning functions of the department.
SP: What are the personal challenges of moving from managing water at the city scale up to the whole state?
TB: One of the big challenges is that in the City of Phoenix, I was very independent and I was responsible for many projects from start to finish, so I was heavily involved in the details from start to finish. Now, I have twenty-five people to manage in five programs, so my ability to get into the details is pretty much zero. So, I’m there at the beginning to help design the project, a little bit of oversight along the way, and then tweak the final product. But, in between, I’m not involved. I had to learn to let go. I told my managers the first day, “If I start getting too crazy about the details and controlling, kick me,” because that’s what I did for twenty three years and it’s hard to change your mind set.
Obviously, another challenge is that Phoenix, as an entity, was easier to represent out in public—the goals and policies created by the City of Phoenix City Council—than it is to balance all the needs across the entire state with a very diverse group of stakeholders, different industries, etc. Also, it’s a bigger challenge to try to build a consensus on a statewide basis than perhaps building consensus the way Phoenix has, even in an active management area or on a regional basis. Again, the City of Phoenix had a long history of very proactive water management; proactively acquiring water supplies and building infrastructure to utilize them. So, there was a lot for me to build on that was there already. Many parts of the State have nothing; they have a few wells and they don’t have the resources that the City had to support what the City did. The towns outside of the metropolitan areas don’t have that. So, it’s finding ways to help them move forward.
SP: You mentioned this in your talk [the WRRC Brown Bag Lecture] a little bit, but could you expand on the differences in approach and recommendations of the Fourth Management Plan over the previous three?
TB: I think it was stated in the questions when the gentleman talked about how the regulatory focus of the first three management plans has born that fruit. There’s not a lot of fruit left to bear going in that direction. There’s probably still some and there will be regulatory aspects, but we really need to get into looking at how to manage the aquifers within each active management area long term to make them sustainable, to make them essentially a reservoir where you can put water in and take water out, and how that works across the entire AMA to avoid localized problems. One of the challenges of doing that in a regulatory way, besides the pushback by the customers, is that you create these regulatory programs over time and the aquifer itself is going to change. In the Phoenix area, we’ve got areas that are in the East Valley where the water table is rising. It wouldn’t make sense to regulate that area when the water table is rising. On the West Valley, it’s going the opposite direction, but the AMA is in safe yield and that causes problems. So, this, I think, is our future. If you want to have a truly sustainable water resource management program, you’re going to have to more closely manage the aquifers in a way that they can be used as below ground reservoirs; you both take water out of them and put water into them.
SP: You’ve been in your position since July, right?
TB: Correct.
SP: So, what do you see so far as the greatest challenges for your department?
TB: The challenges are, given the budget cuts that have occurred and at the current budget level, how to have meaningful input into all the programs that need attention. One of the challenges is prioritizing what we should be spending our resources on. Again, I mentioned some; Colorado River, Statewide Planning, the Active Management Areas, and the Data Collection are where our priorities lie now. It’s a little bit of a shift from historical. For example, the reason the active management areas are in good shape is because of Colorado River water and the CAP, so that needs to be protected.
I think, even though this is not my area directly, it is a priority to create a more efficient department and making the department more user friendly. Again, that will reduce staff time for answering inquiries and reduce the cost to businesses or members of the public who need to spend time looking for data. We need to do more of that online, annual reports for the AMAs need to be more user friendly, and to be able to be done more quickly online. Again, less ADWR staff time answering questions, less time for the various water providers—which equates to money for them—whether they are private water companies or the municipalities. So, we’re really trying to make the department more efficient and one of the silver linings in the cloud of budget cuts is that the department was really forced to do that. The department is way more efficient today than it was a year ago, and this is a result of that’s what had to happen.
Another challenge, and it’s a goal and a challenge, is to break down some of the silos between departments and to empower employees to be more effective by educating them about issues and programs that they don’t work in directly. So, one of our goals is to crosstrain folks so that if we need a hydrology person to help on Colorado River, they at least have a hit-the-groundrunning level of knowledge.
Breaking down silos also avoids redundancy. At one of my very first staff meetings of my managers, I think I had three managers working on the same thing, because of inquiries from the public, and they didn’t know anyone else was working on it. That’s the kind of thing that you just can’t afford to do anymore, and it wasn’t any of their individual faults that that was occurring. Again, when you’re at minimal staff and someone calls you and you’re trying to be responsible to the public, which is a huge responsibility, they say, “Well, I’m going to go do this and get it done.” We need to do a better job with managing those things so we use our resources better. So, that is one of the big goals of the Director.
Our mantra is, “If we ask somebody, ‘Why are we doing that,’ don’t tell us, ‘because that’s the way it was always done’.” We’re trying to move past that; take people out of their comfort zones and have them think outside the box a little bit about, “Yeah, it was done this way for the past ten years, but maybe there is a better way.” We’re really trying to instill that into the staff and any new staff as well.
SP: Related to that, what do you see on the horizon as any major changes in the role of ADWR, either on a state level or on a national level?
TB: Clearly, at the state level, ADWR has been heavily involved in the Colorado River issues and we will continue to be, but we’ve had some statewide rural initiatives. In the past the legislature has earmarked money to work with various watershed groups for those purposes. But, the Department really needs to start focusing on the water supply and infrastructure needs outside of the three county CAP service area. A lot of folks call that “rural,” but they’re not really rural areas – it’s a shorthand way to describe them. There are still challenges in the active management areas and within the three county CAP service area, but with the combination of the water providers themselves and the Department and lots of different programs, they’re in extremely good shape compared to the situation outside of the three central active management areas.
I also have a personal interest and concern about where climate change is going to move us. That’s a very difficult issue because the system is already over appropriated and no one wants to hear that there might be less water in the future. I think, because our supplies of renewable water are in-state and Colorado River, the fallout from climate change is probably going to be different between those two water sheds. One of the concerns I have for the in-state supplies isn’t so much a reduction in the volume, it’s the environmental impacts and the water quality impacts that might be created from the warming of climate change.
Of course, the information that you have available has more uncertainty in it than what is historically used for water planning. Historical planning has uncertainty too, but with climate change there is way more. It’s very difficult for decision makers to understand what that means and how to deal with decision making with data that has a lot of uncertainty inherent in it and to create programs that have a flexibility to adapt to conditions that you can’t foresee. So, that, I think, is a huge challenge for water management in our state.
Then again, a huge challenge is to come up with a funding source that parallels the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority’s existing funding sources, so that entities in the state that need a loan to either get off mined ground or onto renewable or other supplies, can actually make that happen financially. That’s a very controversial issue—how you come up with a funding source that is equitable across the municipal versus rural, equitable across different water stakeholder groups. We have been talking about that since the advent of the Statewide Water Advisory Group – about seven years ago – and we’re still talking.
SP: Looking into the future, what would be your major goals or wishes for the department and state water management?
TB: Having a more robust structural program to deal with the needs outside of the three county CAP area, that’s one of them. We need to continue to work on some of the Indian Water Rights claims and finish some of those settlements, especially ones that could potentially impact the Colorado River supplies for CAP. We need, obviously, to continue to have a strong presence in the Colorado River with the seven basin states and with Mexico to come up with collaborative solutions that will avoid the train wreck of litigation between the states over the management of the river. That’s probably enough for now.
SP: Ok. Is there anything else you’d like to add? The readership of the AWR is really diverse, so there are anywhere from community members to politicians to water management folks.
TB: Yes, there is one thing for students who maybe will be reading this—us old folk, who are getting grey, we talk a lot about who is going to succeed us. You know I work quite a bit with students – I had an intern from ASU last spring through the resource center, and I’ve had that kind of contact with folks where they come and interview me, and when I ask them when they’re getting their degree, what it’s in, what their plans are, very few of them end up staying in the state. That’s one of my frustrations. I understand you need a job and you have to make money, and we don’t have a very good way to funnel the students that come out of our universities back into the water resources field so that they can move forward into being the leaders of the next generation. The way the budgets work right now, nobody can afford to have two people doing the same thing, so the succession planning has really been hurt, not just in the state, but in just about every entity out there—every water provider, municipality, etc.—is going in the opposite direction. So, that’s a big concern of mine. That’s why I’m always happy to do things like this and talk to students.
I try to end with this when I talk to students because I would like to see some of them stay and seek employment in the water world. One of the difficulties of that is many of them are very intelligent, getting advanced degrees, and have a great desire to start higher up on the ladder—really difficult to do. It’s almost like you have to pay your dues and start kind of at the bottom. Sharon [Megdal, WRRC Director] mentioned in her introduction [to the Brown Bag seminar] that I was an intern. The Director of a department was an intern! There are a whole bunch of people in the department who started off as interns – paid interns – and I think it really bodes well to go that path. You really need to be grounded in a lot of things before you can move up into the decision making roles that are out there. So, that’s my plea.