The Bureau of Reclamation, the top federal agency for Colorado River matters, is poised to get a new leader in the coming weeks, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.
Federal officials are soon expected to announce the nomination of Aubrey Bettencourt to lead Reclamation. She has held multiple government positions related to agriculture and water, and would join Reclamation at a tense time for the agency, which is involved in negotiations about new rules for sharing the shrinking Colorado River.
Multiple people who work closely with Reclamation told KJZZ that they expect Bettencourt's nomination to be announced in the near future. KJZZ agreed not to name the sources, as they were not authorized to speak on the matter.
Bettencourt would join Reclamation — a division of the Interior Department — after nearly two decades of jobs with ties to Western water and farming.
Bettencourt's bio from the U.S. Department of Agriculture describes her as a "third-generation farmer" at Bettencourt Farms in central California's San Joaquin Valley.
She previously served as executive director of the California Water Alliance, California state executive director of the USDA's Farm Service Agency, director of sustainability at Western United Dairies and president and CEO of the Almond Alliance of California.
From 2019 to 2021, she oversaw water and science policy at the Interior Department.
Most recently, Bettencourt spent just over a year as the chief of the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service. That agency studies soil and water and has worked to develop, fund and permit water projects in the Colorado River Basin. Bettencourt stepped down from her role at the NRCS in mid-May, as reported by Politico.
Reclamation currently finds itself in the middle of a standoff about how to share the Colorado River's water going forward.
The federal agency runs the nation's two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — and the dams that hold them back. Water levels in Lake Powell are nearing record lows, and further drops could cause big infrastructure problems at Glen Canyon Dam, like the shutdown of massive hydropower generators.
Seven Western states share the Colorado River. It supplies drinking water for nearly 40 million people and fuels a massive agriculture industry that puts produce on shelves across the nation. Reclamation typically waits for those states to agree among themselves on how to share those water supplies. The current rules for sharing water expire later this year, and states are stuck at an impasse in negotiations about how to replace them.
The states are split into two camps and disagree about who should cut back on demand in response to dwindling water supplies. The downstream states of Arizona, California and Nevada have proposed a plan to take some mandatory cutbacks. The upstream states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico have not volunteered to do the same.
If the states can't agree, Reclamation may have to implement its own rules to protect its dams and reservoirs, but that could trigger lawsuits that would likely end up in the Supreme Court. Previous and current federal water leaders have urged states to find consensus and help avoid that.
Bettencourt's background may make her uniquely qualified to lead Reclamation amid the negotiations. She comes from a career in water policy, but also comes from just outside the Colorado River basin.
Last June, the Trump administration nominated longtime water manager Ted Cooke to lead Reclamation. Leaders from the upstream states pushed back on Cooke's nomination, suggesting that his career with the Central Arizona Project — which delivers Colorado River water to the Phoenix and Tucson areas — might make him too biased to impartially lead the agency during negotiations among the states.
Cooke denied that he would bring a bias to the position, but ultimately withdrew his nomination and called himself "a political casualty."
While Bettencourt comes from California, one of the states involved in the negotiations, her ties appear to fall mostly in parts of the state — like the Central Valley — that do not use Colorado River water. Attempts to reach Bettencourt for this story were unsuccessful.
Reclamation's current leader is Scott Cameron, who serves as acting commissioner. It is unclear what his role would be going forward if Bettencourt is nominated to run the agency. Cameron is scheduled to speak at a conference on Colorado River policy in Colorado on Thursday.
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