Dr. Tim Petty: How the Water Subcabinet Promotes Progress
California's Shasta Dam is known as the keystone to the Central Valley Project.
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Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
6 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER
Tim Petty: I have been assistant secretary for water and science in the U.S. Department of the Interior for nearly 2 years. During the Bush administration, I was deputy assistant secretary for almost 4 years under Secretary Kempthorne. Then I went back to the Hill and spent 9 years with Senator James Risch of Idaho. When the Trump administration came in, I went through the normal process of getting selected and confirmed and started in January 2018. I was born and raised in northeastern Indiana on a family farm. I attended public school there, did my undergraduate studies in geoscience at Purdue University, and got a master’s in international business administration at the University of Maryland Global and a PhD from the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s School of Engineering and Mining. My dissertation was in water science and policy. You can find my research, which is mainly on surface hydrology, in three published articles that are available on Google Scholar.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BUREAU OF RECLAMATION.
r. Tim Petty, assistant secretary for water and science in the U.S. Department of the Interior, is responsible for the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and consequently, for a wide variety of issues related to water infrastructure, water resources, energy, ecosystems, and natural disasters. This broad scope naturally brings Dr. Petty into contact with many other federal agencies. In order to better coordinate their vital tasks, Dr. Petty and other officials at the assistant-secretary level have assembled an informal water subcabinet that meets monthly to discuss, plan, and execute water-related projects. In this interview with Municipal Water Leader, Dr. Petty explains how the coordination enabled by the water subcabinet leads to progress and shares his outlook on 2020.
