Daniel P. Beard Quotes
The Colorado River System is changing rapidly. We have a responsibility to reassess the fundamental precepts of how we have managed the river.
Rivers that wind and do not follow a straight course actually change the course and the location of the center of the river bed with surprising rapidity. Some bends of the Colorado river system have moved 50 miles since the late 19th century when the first agreements and laws were made about borders, rights to water, jurisdiction, etc. Due to the centrifugal force of the flowing water on the river banks at the curved bends of the river those bends extend outward and the river bed follows.
Quoted in "Unplugging the Colorado River", The New York Times, May 22, 2016
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
First Mormon Cabinet Member. The water problem did not come upon us suddenly.
Compare this quotation with {632899}. Most members of Congress had limited management experience and the only solution to an organizational problem was to fire people. The referenced quotation has people fired for the purpose of inspiring public trust; in this quotation, it is to trigger reform and change. Ironically, there is no evidence in the management literature that suggests that firing for either of these reasons will have the desired objective.
There are many American communities where this is the case. However there are others where there is not enough water (especially in drought conditions) for the large agricultural use and a growing population. In Denver, they have enough water, but not a sufficient infrastructure to distribute the water to all.
Agriculture, in most of the country, uses much more water than the human population does for personal drinking and hygiene, but in a number of places there is just not enough water to support all the uses in our growing nation. Agriculture has been organized and has been willing to spend large amounts of money to bribe and/or lobby legislators to block many efforts to develop water supplies for cities large and small under the theory that the more water that went to cities, the less there would be for agriculture.
Daniel P. Beard served as the Commissioner of the United States Bureau of Reclamation, and as the fourth Chief Administrative Officer of the United States House of Representatives.
