Point Man on Western Water Is Stepping Down
Bennett Raley, architect of the Bush administration's Western water policies for the last three years, announced Wednesday he was leaving his job as assistant secretary of the Interior for water and science.
Raley oversaw federal policy during a particularly challenging time, when the demands of a fast-growing region collided with drought. Yet he insisted there was plenty of water in the West -- it was just a matter of shifting its uses through water marketing, an approach that many think represents the future of Western water management.
In California, Raley may be remembered best as the folksy but firm bureaucrat who finally made good on the federal government's long-standing threat to put California on a water diet. He did it by forcing the state to agree to stop using more than its share of the Colorado River, freeing up water for other Western states.
A major disappointment of his tenure was a failure to resolve one of the West's angriest contests for water: the struggle that pits the irrigation demands of farmers in the Klamath River basin along the California-Oregon border against the needs of Native Americans and other fishermen who rely on healthy downstream flows to sustain salmon and other fish.
"At least we got people back to where they are at least working with each other," Raley said.
Commenting on his resignation, Raley, a Colorado water lawyer with two teenage daughters, said, "The primary reason is family." He added: "But also I believe in jobs like this, you have a limited shelf life. You have to do your best and move on."
His efforts at compromise gave short shrift to the environment, say conservationists who argue that he helped weaken fish and wildlife protections. And while Western agricultural interests stand to profit handsomely from the farm-to-city water transfers that Raley championed, he angered one of the West's biggest irrigation districts, in California's Imperial Valley, by questioning its water use.
"I'm sorry I've made some people unhappy, but I sleep well at night," said Raley, who grew up in a Colorado ranching family and never gave up his cowboy boots.
He said he planned to resume his law practice and that he had no political aspirations. He also said he doubted his departure would signal a shift in the administration's water policies.
Raley's resignation is effective Friday. Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton named Tom Weimer, principal deputy under Raley, as acting assistant secretary, but did not say who would permanently fill the position.
