Humvee is a water policy mogul, especially in these areas. He has helped shape policies that define how water is used by perhaps the most influential water users along the Colorado River. Humvee juggles his two jobs. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Imperial Irrigation District and was recently named California’s top water negotiator.

And he’s only 27.

The Colorado River is governed by more than a century of legal treaties, most crafted by generations of older white men. In recent years, the top level of policy negotiations on Kawa has begun to diversify, with an increase in women and people of color, but it still tends to be biased toward the elderly. Hamby’s participation will mark the first time a member of Gen Z will be at the negotiating table to make a deal on the Southwest’s most important water resource.

“I think every generation has the chance to do better or worse than the previous generation,” Humby said. “At least my hope is to be one of the representatives of a generation trying to improve the situation.”

The Imperial Valley holds a special place in the story of the Colorado River. It uses more water than any other single region along the river, including dozens of agricultural districts and large cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Denver. Using this allocation, the valley produces about $3 billion in crops and livestock each year. The district is said to be brash, belligerent, and eager to hit back at its critics.

This district is located in California, the state with the highest distribution of rivers. During the winter of 2022-2023 negotiations, the state was the only one to resist a basin-wide agreement deal to reduce use along its dwindling river, many of which are reluctant like the Imperial Irrigation District. It was due to a typical agricultural area.

As climate change reduces the water supply of the Colorado River, interest in the Imperial Valley continues to grow. Water managers in seven river-using states are squeezing every last drop out of finite water and looking for new ways to conserve it. As states develop new rules for water use by 2026, when current guidelines expire, they look to Imperial Irrigation Districts and other agricultural districts to increase pressure to reduce agricultural water use. ing.

Hamby was elected chairman of the Colorado River Commission in California in January, putting him at the river’s most important negotiating table, representing nearly half of the river’s nearly 40 million users. He was given a seat alongside other state delegates.

And he sits in one of the most important moments in river management. There, users are making decisions that could upend generations of water policies and attitudes in the West, trying to collectively figure out how to get by with less water.

Humby grew up in Brawley, California. About 25,000 people live there among vast fields of crops. Humby’s family has lived in the Imperial Valley since his great-grandfather left Texas during the Great Depression and got a job digging irrigation canals in the same waters his descendants now help run. .

“In this scorching hot and harsh place there are tough people who have worked hard and built hard lives…and tough people who have shattered their dreams and made a living and built a life in the hard desert. There are people,” Humby said. we. And I don’t think I’ll be any different. ”

Humvee’s passion for water issues goes hand in hand with his interest in history. He majored in history during his time at Stanford University, but unlike many of his students, his long nights in the library continued long after he graduated.

Now he spends most of his free nights among the piles of leather papers and rolled up maps in the district archives.

On a June afternoon, during a break between meetings, Humvee twisted the dial and flung open the door of an antique vault that sealed a dusty room full of papers dating back more than a century. Here he spent hours poring over minutes from early district meetings.

“There’s nothing really new under the sun in the Colorado River realm,” he said. “People change and the words they use to describe things change, but the core themes and issues we are dealing with today are the same as they were 100 years ago.”

Humby pulled a hard maroon folder from a chest-high shelf in the corner of the vault.

“This is good,” he said, turning the yellowed pages inside.

Ms. Hamby began reading handouts distributed to local farmers during information campaigns against the Central Arizona Plan in the 1940s or 1950s and described the problem of the Colorado River as “misleading” and “disruptive” to California growers. “Attempts” warned.

The Imperial Irrigation District and the Central Arizona Project, a canal that brings water through more than 300 miles of desert to Phoenix, carry that tension into the 21st century.

“Your own experience is a very painful and expensive teacher,” said Hamby. “So it’s good to learn from other people’s spending.”

The conference was heated decades before the current supply and demand imbalance put Colorado River water users on edge. Hamby recalled hearing a particularly “lively discussion” of district board members sitting around a table, each with a gun hidden in a drawer in front of them.

While this century’s water negotiations have probably seen less use of firearms, Humvee’s early years in the Imperial Valley produced controversial and highly publicized water debates. His curiosity grew even more as negotiators drafted his current management guidelines for the Colorado River in 2007 and re-enforced the rules in 2019 to include a drought contingency plan. When Humvee was old enough to get involved himself, he felt it was important to help him prepare the plan. Imperial Valley and California to embark on next wave of negotiations.

“I had a really strong interest in history,” Humby said. “We are particularly interested in the history of our area and the Colorado River, and we just so happened to grow up in the very place where all these discussions began in earnest about a century ago.”

Armed with a solid knowledge of the past, the Humvee brings his youth to life.

“I think other people think about it sometimes,” he said. “But that’s not what I really care about.”

Humby’s colleagues agree that his age is not a barrier.

“I think he turned it into a positive and gave us some kind of a fresh perspective on things,” said Tina Shields, water department manager at Imperial Irrigation District. “You’re doing things because you’ve been doing them for a long time and you’ve always done them. And I think he can change things a little bit from that perspective.”

Shields said that while the group of people shaping Colorado River policy still has a long way to go in terms of diversity, he was “treated like this” at a conference in Las Vegas early in his career. said it was already different. cocktail waitress. ”

“Maybe diversity isn’t where it needs to be,” she says. “But I don’t think it’s the old white man in the old photos.”

Hamby had to balance the new perspectives he brought to the negotiating table with the needs of the people he represented. In his backyard, a multitude of growers make huge profits on farms that have been owned by his family for generations.

John Hawke, a farmer and county-level politician, placed Mr. Humby under his patronage around 2019, when Mr. Humby first ran for the district’s board of directors with the campaign slogan “Water is Life.” rice field.

“Some of the valley producers are looking at the value of water in dollars and cents,” Hawke says. “But many of us in the farming community see the value of growing crops in that, and I think JB sees it that way.”

Perhaps Humvee’s most difficult task, like many before him in state water negotiations, is to do everything in his power to keep water in California. California’s Colorado River allotment is not only the largest of his seven states in the Colorado River basin, but also the least legally untouchable.

The 1922 Colorado River Accords set out how water would be shared in the western arid basin. The legal system gives priority to older water uses, such as agricultural areas, which are the last to be shut down in the event of water shortage. A legal scaffold built on a compact site protects the Imperial Valley’s vast amount of uses.

California’s largest water user wants this legal priority to be preserved. When asked about their role in negotiations about the river’s future, Humby and other California water managers pointed to existing laws and insisted they should be followed. Water policy experts say California’s river conservation status won’t change without a nasty legal battle that states generally agree is best avoided.

“[Humvee]looked at the text of the law and said, ‘It says, this is legal, let’s support it,'” Hawke said. “And I don’t think you could ask for more than that.”

Hamby appears to be sticking to a law-based approach for now. California and the Imperial Irrigation District have signed conservation agreements in recent months, but their contributions still lag behind the cuts agreed by Arizona.

In October 2022, the district will reduce its water use by a total of 400,000 acre-feet annually from 2023 to 2026, bringing together four government agencies that have agreed to reduce California’s total water use by approximately 9%. was one of mine. Imperial is allocated 2.6 million acre-feet of land each year and will contribute more than half of statewide conservation efforts.

In January 2023, just weeks after Mr. Humby took over as California’s top water negotiator, the state was the only resister to a water-saving proposal signed by all six other states that use the Colorado River. became.

After the proposal was announced, Hamby told KUNC that the process for its creation was “horribly broken” and not implemented in good faith.

Since then, Hamby said he has worked to build better relationships with water leaders in other states and keep things more conversational and less hostile.

In May, California, Arizona and Nevada agreed to jointly conserve 1 million acre feet of water each year through 2026. They pledged, and once did, to provide at least $1.2 billion in federal funding to encourage farmers to suspend their water use.

Arizona’s top negotiator, Tom Buschatke, credited his relationship with Humvee as a contributing factor to the conflicting states’ agreement.

“JB and I met in Yuma and had a good one-on-one conversation. That’s what I was thinking,” Busschacke said at the recent University of Colorado River Symposium. “And I think it started where we ended up between Arizona and California.”

That’s also true from a Humvee perspective.

“The Colorado River is history,” Hamby said. “It’s science, it’s law, but perhaps equal, if not greater, than those things is relationship.”