Director Tom Buschatzke of the Arizona Department of Water Resources: Dealing With the Tier 1 Shortage on the Colorado River
Tom Buschatzke (standing, fifth from left) and other water professionals join former Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman (seated, left) and former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Tim Petty (seated, right) at the signing of the Drought Contingency Plan in April 2019.
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Irrigation Leader: Please tell our readers about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Tom Buschatzke: I have a bachelor of science degree in geology from the State University of New York. I came
8 | IRRIGATION LEADER | November/December 2021
to Arizona to attend graduate school at Arizona State University. I have 40 years of experience in water resource management. I started working for the ADWR in 1982 as an intern. I spent 6 years there and then went to work for the City of Phoenix for more than 20 years. In 2011, I came back to the ADWR as an assistant director, overseeing many of its policy licensing functions. In 2015, the governor appointed me director, and I have been in this role ever since. Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about the ADWR. Tom Buschatzke: The department was created by the 1980 Groundwater Management Act. We are both a regulatory and a planning agency, and we are responsible for Colorado River management throughout the state. We also do a lot of permitting—for instance, requiring developments to have 100 years of an assured water supply before houses can be built. We also have a program for municipal, industrial, irrigationleadermagazine.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BUREAU OF RECLAMATION.
rizona is an arid state whose productive farmland and major urban areas are supplied by carefully husbanded water from the Colorado River, among other sources. The severe, decades-long drought in the Colorado basin has now triggered a tier 1 shortage under the terms of the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) and, with it, automatic cuts to certain lower-priority water users in Arizona and the other basin states. In this interview, Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR), tells us about how Arizona is responding to the tier 1 cuts and planning to secure its future water supplies.
