When Bennett Raley was named the Bush administration’s top water official, environmentalists who battled him for years feared the worst from the cowboy-turned-lawyer.
Three years later, many environmentalists say Raley has been a surprise. He helped wrangle rival water agencies into signing a landmark Colorado River accord last year. And environmentalists cheered when ideas they had been urging for years turned up in a program aimed at helping cities face looming water shortages.
The 47-year-old Coloradan has shown an ability to get along with people on all sides of an issue. It’s a trait he’ll need as Western states race to cope with one of the most severe droughts in modern times.
As assistant interior secretary for water and science, Raley oversees both the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Reclamation. Virtually unknown in the East, the Bureau of Reclamation helped create the modern American West. The $950 million-a-year agency built more than 600 dams and reservoirs in 17 states that generate power, irrigate farmfields in the desert, and deliver water to 30 million people.
“It’s not easy playing God,” Raley says about his job.
Dealing with drought
Assistant secretaries, he acknowledges, are a dime a dozen. But Raley may not be so quickly forgotten. He repeatedly appears in the spotlight as he tackles some of the water world’s biggest problems, such as getting seven Western states to amicably share the Colorado River.
Most notably, Raley succeeded in getting California to agree to wean itself from overuse of the Colorado River, a plan started during the Clinton administration. He strong-armed a group of stubborn farmers in California’s Imperial Valley by using the threat of taking their water as leverage for the deal.
Now, Raley is warning about drought. After five dry years, he says the West may be nearing a Colorado River water shortage and the first-ever cut in the amount of water that can be drawn from the 1,450-mile river supplying 25 million people. Raley is pushing the Western states to come up with their own solution. He’s asked them to report this month on possible options.
An avid outdoorsman, Raley took five journalists in April on a 225-mile rafting trip through Grand Canyon, camping seven nights with state and federal officials and one environmentalist, Jennifer Pitt of Environmental Defense. Raley shed his familiar blue suit for a cowboy hat and outdoor duds to lead a floating seminar on the Colorado River, Glen Canyon dam, endangered species and Grand Canyon.
“I’m passionate about this place,” Raley said. “I’m passionate about rivers, have been all my life. I’m passionate about all the things they mean to us.”
On the river, Raley showed his disarming humor — “I have the personality of a rock,” he quipped — and his temper. He snapped, “Back off” to persistent questioning from one reporter.
The trip was Raley’s third through Grand Canyon since taking office. Each time, he has brought an inflatable kayak to shoot Hermit Rapid, a set of five increasingly large waves culminating in a huge mound of foaming white water. Raley had tried it twice before and succeeded once. He said it still scared him.
Raley and his air-filled kayak seemed no match for Hermit. But he made it over the first wave, and somehow kept paddling through the second. Then the third. And the fourth. The fifth knocked him out of his boat. Raley later wrote “Hermit III” in marker on the back of his life vest in honor of his third attempt at the rapid.
“I was so close,” he said as he emerged coughing from the water.
River changed attitude
Rafting the river has changed his views on policy, he acknowledged. Raley says he was deeply skeptical of an ambitious experiment to see whether Glen Canyon Dam, just upstream from Grand Canyon, could help rescue the canyon’s disappearing native ecosystem by unleashing simulated floods with huge pulses of water. But he emerged convinced that the plan was based on solid science and research by the canyon’s Geological Survey team.
The latest trip prompted Raley to intercede on a plan to bulldoze Colorado River delta habitat. Pitt, the lone environmentalist, spoke out against an obscure U.S.-Mexico water commission’s plan to dredge the delta for 10,000-year flood protection — an event so rare that Pitt said it didn’t justify the cost or damage. Raley arranged for Pitt to reiterate her concerns to the State Department’s point person on water issues.
Raley “listened and he thought about it and he did something about it,” Pitt said.
Raley is the grandson of a part-Cherokee wrangler and trapper who came to Colorado hoping to cure his tuberculosis in the high desert air. He spent his childhood in the mining and ranching town of Norwood, Colo., where he did cowboy chores such as herding sheep and cattle.
He attended his first water meeting at 11 with his father, a county agent who served on water boards. He worked as a backpacking guide and explored the West’s national parks. The year he fished 45 days he calls one of the best of his life.
As a water lawyer in Denver, Raley represented landowners, local governments, water districts and the state of New Mexico on endangered species issues. He told a U.S. House committee in 1999 that if he could, he would repeal the Endangered Species Act and replace it with a law that provided more protection for states and property owners. He joined the Mountain States Legal Foundation, an activist group of lawyers that sues on behalf of conservative causes, mainly on property rights.
Although environmentalists who knew Raley liked and respected him, they were worried when Norton picked him to work on her team.
“Our own worst enemy is going to run all the Western water projects,” is how Western Resource Advocates’ Bruce Driver recalled the feeling at the time.
Some Colorado environmentalists say Raley hasn’t changed since he went to Washington; he still favors farms over fish. Farm groups say that while they trust Raley because of his background, they haven’t been thrilled at his every move.
“We’re not getting all we want,” said Dan Keppen who represents irrigators in the Klamath basin along the California-Oregon border, the site of a crisis sparked in 2001 when Interior cut farm water to save endangered salmon. “I don’t think any interest group is getting all they want.”
Water 2025 an example in compromise
Environmentalists applauded Raley’s Water 2025 program, unveiled last year. The program stresses conservation, efficiency and water markets as the best ways to help Western communities survive expected water shortages in the years to come. Water 2025 sent a subtle signal to the water community that building dams was not the way to provide water for a growing West.
“Look at 2025,” Raley says. “A lot of people laughed at it. Look at what’s not there: building our way out of it.”
Water 2025 prompted some grumbling in the farm community, but no revolt. “It’s good politics,” said Environmental Defense’s Tom Graff, who had been proposing similar ideas for years.
That’s not to say that Raley left his deep beliefs in property and individual rights in Colorado. On the rafting trip, Raley said almost every day in Washington he feels the pull of the opposing forces of idealism and compromise.
“I firmly believe that if you find yourself losing either when you’re working in public policy, you’re potentially in great danger. If you have no idealism and are a mere prostitute, it doesn’t work. If you are a zealot with no sense of balance ... that doesn’t work either.” Raley said.
“Many days the agony is there, and I fear anyone in public policy who doesn’t feel it.”