ARIZONA'S PRACTITIONER-LED WATER MANAGEMENT PROGRAM
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n the desert states of the American Southwest, water management is a challenge and an art. Municipalities, irrigation districts, builders, attorneys, and policymakers must all be intimately familiar with the full spectrum of water-related challenges they may face. In Arizona, the Agribusiness & Water Council of Arizona (ABWC) and Arizona State University’s Fulton Schools of Engineering and Morrison School of Agribusiness have combined forces to create the Water Management Certificate Program. The program was developed in 2011 and welcomed its first class in 2013. Its aim is to train both established professionals and master’s-level students seeking to enter the water industry, and in so doing, establish connections among all who take part. In this interview with Irrigation Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill, the Agribusiness & Water Council’s executive director, Chris Udall, and three members of its executive committee, George Fletcher, Larry Olson, and Bill Plummer, discuss the Certificate Program’s history, its special features, and its goals and accomplishments.
Bill Plummer: I have a long history in water resources. I started with the Bureau of Reclamation in Yuma, Arizona, and after that worked in Washington, DC, at the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of the Secretary of the Interior. Then I went back to the field with the Bureau of Reclamation as regional director in Salt Lake City and later in Boulder City. After leaving Reclamation, I consulted in water resources in Arizona and internationally in South and Southeast Asia. In between, I joined the Arizona Department of Water Resources as director and later as manager of Yuma Mesa Irrigation and Drainage District. I serve as the coordinator for the ABWC program.
Larry Olson: I am a professor at ASU and the program chair for the Environmental and Resource Management Program at ASU’s Fulton Schools of Engineering. The Fulton Schools of Engineering, along with the ABWC and ASU’s Morrison School of Agribusiness, is one of the three organizations that certify the graduates of this program. The majority of the students in the program are working professionals who are not taking the program for academic credit, but the program does include students from ASU who are taking it for credit. Most of those students are in my program, the Environmental and Resource Management Program, which is a master’s degree program with a
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PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN HARWOOD.
Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you ended up in your current positions at the program.
I got involved in the Water Management Certificate Program a number of years ago after Richard Morrison, a member of the ABWC executive committee who had been promoting a program such as this for years, invited me to work with Arizona State University (ASU) to develop a management program for people in the water resources industry. It was to be taught not by academics but by practitioners in the field who had substantial experience in managing and operating water resources projects and related programs. A team of dedicated ABWC executive committee members developed a 9-month program that covered water management issues, including planning, operations, construction, communications, and management and legislative issues. Initially, the intention was to train managers for irrigation districts, but the focus has expanded since then. In addition to irrigation-district personnel, we have a substantial number of students from the municipal sector, mostly in water conservation programs and agribusiness, attorneys professionals from environmental organizations, and consultants. Most of our students are from Arizona, though we have had students from New Mexico and California as well.
