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Dave Roberts: Careful Planning and Strong Partnerships—The Keys to the Salt River Project's Water Reliability, Today and in the Future Roosevelt Dam, the largest dam in SRP’s system.
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Municipal Water Leader: Tell us about SRP and its history.
6 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020
Dave Roberts: SRP was formed in 1903 as one of the first Reclamation projects authorized under the National Reclamation Act. Over the years, SRP has evolved to become the largest supplier of water in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area, delivering more than 800,000 acre-feet annually to agricultural, municipal, and urban water users. It is also a community-based, not-for-profit public power utility serving more than 1 million customers in greater Phoenix. More than 100 years ago, the federal government and local leaders and landowners in central Arizona realized that federal investment in infrastructure through partnerships with local landowners was critical to ensuring that the community in the Salt River Valley would be able to manage the waters of the Salt and Verde Rivers to allow the region to grow and prosper. Ranchers municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF SRP.
he Salt River Project (SRP) is a major utility that provides both electrical power and water to more than 2 million people in the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan region. SRP manages 131 miles of Bureau of Reclamation– owned canals and more than 1,000 miles of laterals. With such a large customer base in a region susceptible to drought, SRP puts significant effort into conservation, efficiency, and maintaining its storage and delivery infrastructure for the future. In this interview, Dave Roberts, SRP associate general manager and chief water resources executive, tells Municipal Water Leader about SRP’s contributions to the Colorado River basin's Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) and its work to increase its resilience to drought conditions both on the Colorado and on the Salt River.
