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Alan Hamel, 2014 President's Award Growing up in Pueblo in the 1950s, Alan Hamel liked to swin in the Arkansas River. His father, Bob, owned an automobile repair business. His mother, Jean, worked as a psychiatric technician at the state hospital. in those days, Pueblo was a gritty industrial town largely dependent on Colorado Fuel and Iron, its steel and iron mill the principal employer. Ethnically diverse, a town of working men and women located at the confluence of the Arkansas River and Foundation Creek, Pueblo had a long history of manufacturing rails for the narrow gauges that opened up the Colorado Rockies for mining, timbering, settlement and recreation. Read more about Alan Hamel
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Sean Cronin, 2014 Emerging Leader Award Sean Cronin got used to planning for drought in his former job as a water resources manager for the City of Greeley, but since the devastating September 2013 flood in northern Colorado, he's been coping with way too much water. As excutive director of the St. Vrain & Left Hand Water Conservancy District, Sean is helping to piece together relationships necessary to construct more resilient water systems and riverine habitat for the near and long term. Read more about Sean Cronin
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In celebrating its 10th Anniversary, the Colorado Foundation for Water Education presented its President's Award for lifetime achievement in water education to Senator Lewis Entz and Representative Diane Hoppe. We enjoyed keynote remarks from Senator Mark Udall. Missed it? View photos from the event. In the spring of the devastating 2002 drought, Representative Diane Hoppe and Senator Lewis Entz steered CFWE into existence. In the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s water projects bill they co-sponsored that year, the General Assembly established this new statewide non-profit water education organization “to promote a better understanding of water issues through educational opportunities and resources so Colorado citizens will understand water as a limited resource and will make informed decisions.” Chairs of the House and Senate water and agriculture committees respectively, Hoppe and Entz served on the Foundation’s first Board of Trustees, Hoppe as President. As the drought deepened into 2003, so did the need to communicate personally with Coloradans about the realities of water use and conservation in a water scarce land. Together with the other members of the original Board under the leadership of Executive Director Karla Brown, they spurred development of the River Basin Tours, the Water Leaders’ Program, the Citizen’s Guide series to essential water topics and Headwaters magazine, a periodical featuring on the ground stories of water use and conservation. In the magazine’s inaugural Fall 2003 edition, Hoppe wrote: "In this issue we recount the 2002 drought—its severity and what it says about our vulnerability to future droughts . . . growth, legal developments, drought, floods and the use of water in the everyday lives of Coloradans are some of the very public and personal themes we will explore in every issue." -by Justice Greg Hobbs Read more about Representative Diane Hoppe and Senator Lewis Entz. |
Nolan Doesken, Colorado’s State Climatologist, proclaims the weather like a prophet the scriptures or the farmer a rain cloud. As an outstanding water educator, Nolan travels throughout Colorado, showing how its climate shapes our great land, wildlife and people. The Climate Center that Nolan heads at Colorado State University is responsible for monitoring and tracking climatic conditions
throughout the state. The agricultural, municipal and recreational economies depend upon the careful conservation and use of our state’s often scare water supply.
Read more about Nolan and his great work...
Water and its use have been part of Russell George’s life from the time he was spreading it on fields on the 4th-generation family farmstead near Rifle, where his father Walter George served as president of the local ditch company. His interest in irrigated farming led Russ to consider a career in agricultural sciences, but “when it became obvious I wasn’t cut out for science,” he set his sights on a law degree, which he completed at Harvard Law School in 1971. “At that time,” he observes, “there were no programs focusing on water law.” One became a water lawyer by just jumping into it, and he sought help from some of the best – legendary Frank Delaney and “Blue” Balcomb. Russ married Neal Ellen Moore after law school and they returned to Rifle where Neal began a teaching career, Russ opened a general law practice with a preference for water cases and they began raising four sons.
In 1992 he entered politics, and was elected to the Colorado General Assembly. Russ is very much a “Jeffersonian Republican” with a conviction that government works best at the local and state levels where “it has more meaning for people.” His dedication led his peers to name him “Legislator of the Year” twice, and in 1999 he became Speaker of the House. In 2000, Governor Owens asked him to direct the Division of Wildlife and after four years there, he became the director of the Department of Natural Resources – home of nearly every state agency associated with water.
At DNR, his commitments to fair water allocation and well-coordinated good governance came together in his advocacy for the 2005 “Colorado Water for the 21st Century Act.” Concerned about the litigation over stalled water projects – Two Forks, Homestake II, Union Park – he began to pose the idea at meetings around the state of a statewide negotiating process. “Roundtables” in each of the states’ eight river basins (and a ninth for the “metropolitan sink”) would be charged with completing needs assessments to meet future water demands, and an “Interbasin Compact Committee” made up of roundtable representatives and agency appointees would seek mutually beneficial ways to move water between basins.
Russ gives a lot of credit for this legislation to West Slope attorney Peter Nichols and Governor Owens, and legislators like Josh Penry and Jim Isgar who shepherded its passage, but there is general agreement in the water community that his reputation for fair governance gave this “evolutionary act” the impetus to pass the Assembly on the first try. Now in its fifth year, the IBCC has still not been really “tested”, but there is growing agreement that the basin roundtables are a resounding success.
Today, Russ has moved to the directorship of the Department of Transportation, where he says he is trying to develop some of the same kind of open collaborative structure. But his greatest legacy to the state may well be the new public processes for addressing the complex challenges of future water supplies in this “land where life is written in water.”
- Biography by George Sibley
