Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

You are the presiding officer of the Board Meetings. It’s a little less than being a
mayor because even in the Arizona system where we have weak mayor form of
government, the mayor nevertheless is the presumptive spokesperson. Most
people know who the mayor is. Nobody knows who the President of CAP is. It
was mostly, you got to make some speeches, you got to cut some ribbons,
although in the CAP example it’s turning a head gate. I have a good story about
turning a head gate, I’ll tell you later. I spent a lot more time talking to the staff at
that point and kind of trying to structure agendas and how policy decisions got
brought to the Board. It’s an interesting…I’d thought before about trying to write
something sometime about the interesting government lesson of a fairly narrowpurpose
special unit of government like the Central Arizona Project that tends to
make exceedingly technical and complex decisions. What tends to happen in
that context is that the staff run everything because it is simply too hard for the
Board to figure out what it is they need to know and what they don’t need to know
in order to make the decisions they need to make. There is a tendency of some
people to attempt to micromanage on a board like that, that’s extremely difficult
with the technical level of questions that are presented or there’s a tendency to
just kind of check out and go along with whatever the staff want to do and the
CAP has a fabulous staff and most of the time, that’s fine. But there is a reason
why there are elected people there to do something. There are a series of
decisions that get made that really are policy decisions. They are not even
political decisions in the sense that the public has no clue what these decisions
are about. It’s not like you are deciding how to punish a crime or how to deal
Interview with Grady Gammage
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