Bureau of Reclamation Stakeholders Meeting July 16, 2014
Opening Remarks Lowell Pimley, Acting Commissioner
First of all, thanks for coming, everybody, and for those of you tuning in on the web.
As Dan said, we hold these things periodically back in D.C., and some of you are able to get back there, some of you are not.
For those meetings, usually the folks that you have representing you back there show up.
But we thought, since we were going to be in Denver this week anyway for a leadership team meeting,
we would go ahead and schedule one of these.
We have done these in the past out West. It is just a better opportunity, frankly, for us to meet with the individuals
from the districts themselves in a little more convenient manner for you all.
As Dan mentioned, I am Acting Commissioner right now. My background, if you haven't heard, I spent over 30 years here in this building
working on technical issues here on design and planning work for predominantly construction and O and M.
I've been back in D.C. about a year and half now as Deputy Commissioner for Operations, where I get to work with all of the regional directors,
and the folks here in this building who do those technical designs.
With Deputy Secretary Connor's move up to the Deputy Secretary position,
he asked me to step in while we get another commissioner confirmed.
Mr. Estevan Lopez has cleared Committee. He is awaiting a floor vote at this time. We would expect something this summer or fall.
But we are quickly running out of time in July before the August recess. Fingers crossed that we will get Estevan in place here in short order.
The agenda covers a lot of topics, short, medium term.
Folks who will be speaking have a lot more details than I can provide at this time.
I think you will find it is a pretty thorough agenda.
We've got drought issues we are dealing with across the West.
It is a pretty historic year.
California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Kansas, the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas are experiencing unprecedented droughts.
So we've got our hands full this summer, quite frankly.
The budget issues -- Mr. Wolf will talk about those. We have a House action for 2015 that is not as friendly, maybe, as we would hope.
I think, if we get to the Senate, it will fare a little bit better in that,
and when we get to a compromise bill in conference, I think we will fare well.
It is just you never know in this environment. It is a tough economic time and budget time.
You are going to hear on long-term issues here that we are dealing with on safety.
We have had some issues up in the Pacific Northwest
that have really opened our eyes that we needed to refocus on safety across this organization.
We have the climate change issue we are dealing with.
Whatever the reason behind the changes in weather patterns, we certainly are seeing them, and we need to be adaptive and ready
to manage our infrastructure to accommodate those new patterns.
And then Don Glaser is going to talk about aging infrastructure.
We teed this up back at Family Farm in February.
It is going to be a long-term action for us to get our arms more around that issue in a manner that we can address
the long-term challenges that you all face and we face in a transparent manner that we can more easily explain
to the folks on the Hill and at OMB, and to demonstrate the need for us
to continue to invest in that infrastructure we have put so much time and energy into over the years.
One thing that is not on the agenda but might be on your minds is, we have had to come up with a marijuana policy in this agency.
And, reality is, it's new territory for us.
We're going to have some time at the end for Q and A's if we do want to have some questions on that.
We'll be ready to hopefully clarify our position on that.
But the reason we took that on, candidly, is after the laws passed in Colorado and Washington,
we started getting inquiries from districts as to, "What are we supposed to do with this?"
So we had to take it on, and we have come up with a policy.
We have worked with the White House, we have worked with DOJ, and we've worked within the Department
to come up with a temporary policy that we can have out on the street this irrigation season, and then we will regroup within about a year or so.
I think you are going to hear more about these other subjects; we can certainly expand on the marijuana discussion if you like.
The folks in Policy are here to help lay out that process.
With that, hopefully you will stick around.
Those of you who are here, across the street see the lab. It's pretty impressive if you haven't been there before.
With any luck, we'll be able to break a big concrete cylinder and send some concrete home with you if you like -
because we just have to shovel it off anyway.
Okay. Thanks.