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National Water Resources Association President Christine Arbogast on WRDA 2020
A 2018 gathering in Washington, DC, of the Women in Water organization, which sponsors the Women in Water Scholarship Fund. Christine Arbogast is seventh from the right.
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or several decades, Congress has considered omnibus water development acts every 2 or so years; these laws are frequently entitled the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA). On December 27, 2020, President Trump signed P.L. 116‑260, which included WRDA 2020. In this interview, National Water Resources Association President Christine Arbogast tells us about the new legislation and what it means for western water providers and users. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
34 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | March 2021
Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the Women in Water scholarship fund, which you helped found. municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE NWRA.
Christine Arbogast: From high school on, I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I was the editor of my high school paper and started out as a journalism major in college and was the editor of the student newspaper. I ended up doublemajoring in journalism and political science, and my goal was to be a political reporter. I started my career as a reporter for two small Colorado newspapers, one of which was located in Durango, Colorado. I did a lot of reporting on the two local Indian tribes and on water-related stories, including on the Bureau of Reclamation’s Dolores Project in the Cortez area and the controversial proposed Animas–La Plata Project just outside Durango. I reported for about 4 years, until a gentleman from my hometown, Ray Kogovsek, was elected to Congress. The man who ran his campaign was my college political science advisor, and he advised Ray to hire me as his press secretary. I thought that it would incorporate a number of my interests and decided to do it for one term—I didn’t want to live in Washington, DC, longer than that. Colorado’s third congressional district is vast.
Geographically, it’s the eighth-largest congressional district in the country. Natural resources and water are huge issues for the district. Congressman Kogovsek got on the House Interior Committee, which is now the House Natural Resources Committee, and I worked with the legislative assistant who did water. I ended up staying there for 5½ years. When Ray decided not to run for reelection, I came back to Colorado and went to work for the Colorado commissioner of agriculture. I did some special projects with him, including the launch of Always Buy Colorado, which is now called Colorado Proud. When he returned to Colorado, Ray started a small lobbying firm called Kogovsek & Associates and asked me to come back to work for him. We were different because we were based in Colorado and offered our clients much more reasonable rates than a DC-based firm. Our first clients were some of the water districts we had worked with when Ray was in Congress and the two Indian tribes that I knew so well. It was then I started attending National Water Resources Association (NWRA) meetings. I was young and I was a woman, which was unusual. People figured I must be someone’s daughter. I got the same reaction at the Colorado Water Congress, which I started attending at the same time. I have been going to the meetings of the NWRA and the Colorado Water Congress, along with the Family Farm Alliance after its inception, ever since. When I first started attending, I never aspired to be the president of the NWRA, but I was made chair of the federal affairs committee, and I got to be more and more immersed in it.
