Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

hundred and twenty-five thousand votes, because I had the same name as the
“big pink building”. So I show up out at CAP, after getting lost a bunch of times
and you get seated at the board. In those days they didn’t really do very much
board orientation, they’ve gotten much better about it now. I thought I would
recognize a lot of the people who would be in the audience from the fact that I
had at that point spent twenty-five years representing developers in zoning
cases. I mean I was at the cutting edge of real estate development and urban
growth and all these issues in Arizona. And I looked out in the audience and
didn’t recognize anyone, because the CAP Board, particularly then, was an
obscure, little-known, quasi-mysterious agency that met in a remote, bunker-like
location and the meetings were attended only by the Water Buffaloes, the people
who make their living in water. They are either working for a city, consulting for a
city, representing a city, representing a farm, representing a mine, not very much
even representing real estate development or industry. It really has been the
province of the professional technocrats, the plumbers, the people who build the
pipes and the infrastructures, and farmers and the mines or the big water users.
It was this kind of historical remnant of the old Arizona, the economy of the old
Arizona that was still sort of functioning and still is kind of creaking along
So, I
felt completely out of water as it were. I was used to all this real estate stuff. I
was used to debating urban growth. It was all different people talking about all
different things and they speak entirely in acronyms. For like a year, I had no
clue what these people were talking about. What I discovered is that as long as
you look sincere and speak loudly, they think that you’re getting it. But it was just
Interview with Grady Gammage
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