Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

A. It’s interesting. I was in Las Vegas awhile back talking about these water and
growth issues. I was on a panel with Pat Mulroy the czarina of Las Vegas. I was
talking about my concerns that we have decoupled water and growth in the West
largely and partly because of our inherited Bureau of Reclamation mind set;
partly because of our unwillingness to recognize potential restraints on growth in
places like Phoenix. We don’t very often talk about water and growth at the
same time in the same place with the same people. I think we have to re-couple
those. She’s very resistant to that. She is a true water buffalo and true buffalos
don’t want to be involved in growth debates. They just want to go get the water
and let somebody else fight about it. When Mulholland dedicated the aqueduct
to bring the water from the Owens River Valley to Los Angeles, he turned the
head gate and said, “There it is. Take it.” That is the attitude of most water
managers. It’s not my problem now. You wanted me to get it here. I built you
the plumbing and I got you the water. What her answer to Las Vegas—which is
essentially out of water, there’s no more water to grow in Las Vegas—is we’ll just
[build] desalting plants over on the California coast. They’ll use that water and
we’ll use their water out of the Colorado. Ultimately, she is probably right. What
the market will bear for domestic water is houses, we have no idea. We know
what people will pay for Aquafina and Desanti water and if they would pay that
for tap water, you could build all the desalting plants that you’d ever need. It’s
just a matter of economics.
Interview with Grady Gammage
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