In our cover story, Dave Roberts, the associate general manager and chief water resources executive of Arizona’s Salt River Project (SRP), talks about the agency’s contributions to the Colorado River basin’s Drought Contingency Plan and its work to increase its resilience to drought conditions both on the Colorado and on the Salt River. 

Next, two articles by SRP staff further update us on water management in Arizona’s Valley of the Sun. In one, SRP’s principal for water system projects, Ron Klawitter, describes how SRP is keeping its reservoirs and other major infrastructure in top condition to serve future generations of Arizonans. In the other, SRP’s director of water strategy, Christa McJunkin, describes the benefits of SRP’s partnership with the Central Arizona Project (CAP) and the planned construction of an SRP-CAP Interconnection Facility to complement the existing CAP-SRP Interconnection Facility. 

David Jackson, the treatment practice leader at the consulting engineering firm Freese and Nichols, tells us of the firm’s more than 120 years of wastewater experience and its commitment to client service. 

Richard Gilb of the San Diego International Airport gives us a fascinating look into how a facility with the nation’s single busiest runway captures and reuses rainwater and is planning for the future with a water stewardship plan. 

Finally, in our The Innovators section, we speak with Meena Sankaran, founder and CEO of the award-winning firm KETOS, which provides water quality and quantity data services to clients with its patented hardware and software. 

With growing populations, aging infrastructure, and changing climatic conditions, water management must always be future oriented. SRP’s work with partners across Arizona and the Colorado River basin provide an excellent example of this, as does the work of all the entities we feature in this final issue of 2020. 

Kris Polly is editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and president and CEO of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He may be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.