On Thursday, September 5, 2024, Water Education Colorado recognized Doug Kemper with the 2024 Diane Hoppe Leadership Award. Read more about the award and past award winners here.
Doug Kemper has served since 2005 as the Executive Director of the Colorado Water Congress, where he has fostered an increasingly diverse and inclusive community and meaningful collaboration. After a 44-year career in Colorado water, he will retire this fall to spend time pursuing hobbies ranging from learning to play exotic instruments and serving as a church elder to hiking and skiing. He’s also looking forward to spending more time with his family.
Doug never set out to lead the Colorado Water Congress (CWC), but doing so has fit perfectly with his passion for working through politically and technically complex situations involving a multitude of interests to find common ground. (And anyone who has attended would agree, he also puts on a darn good convention!)
“Throughout my career, several fortuitous, unpredictable intersections of people and circumstances made little adjustments in my life that ultimately made major differences…I had no idea when I started my career that I would end up at the Water Congress,” he reflects.
Doug first took the helm at CWC after the previous director, Dick MacRavey, retired after 26 years. Doug had already served on the CWC board, becoming its youngest president in history, a title he held until “Joe Frank beat my record.”
During his nearly two decades at CWC, Doug was able to take an established organization—it officially formed in 1958—further build its reputation, and use it as an organizing tool to, in his words “continue to advance the integrity of what we do in Colorado water. It can be a high-conflict environment but it can also be very rewarding as we seek to find these optimal solutions that balance a wide range of diverse interests. Participating and contributing to these collaborative processes has been the joy of my career.”
His priorities have centered around three main things. First, to “build up our conferences, which were dying when I came on. Bored at too many conferences, I wanted to put on events I would enjoy attending.” Second, to maintain CWC’s highly successful legislative record. And finally, to achieve financial stability for the organization. On all fronts, he’s found success, and he credits that success to support and participation from the CWC Board and the water community.
Describing the State Affairs Committee meetings that undergird CWC’s legislative work, Doug says, “Every Monday during the legislative session, 120-150 people get on the phone or Zoom for an hour to an hour and half, and anywhere from three to seven legislators join in throughout the session. Do the math on that. That’s thousands of human hours every year that go into shaping our water law. Anywhere from 30-40 bills are proposed every year. It’s this really dynamic nature of developing our statutes and involving stakeholders…it’s unusual to have that level of legislator participation, and that relationship is extremely important to us.”
Legislator education was also a key part of the work, and Doug regularly partnered with Water Education Colorado to accomplish it. In fact, throughout his tenure at CWC, Doug was a champion for Water Education Colorado and its mission, providing opportunities for WEco to elevate its message and speak to CWC audiences. His support stemmed in part from his understanding of the two organizations’ historical roots. The earliest vision of the Colorado Water Congress—in its platform adopted at its very first meeting in 1958 —identified the need for a water education organization that became the vision for ultimately establishing WEco. He’s carried forward—and advanced—that longstanding vision through his dedicated partnership.
Prior to taking the helm at Colorado Water Congress in 2005, Doug spent 20 years as the water resources manager with Aurora Water where his responsibilities included planning, system modeling, acquisitions, and operation of the city’s 120-some water rights in three river basins. He also worked with city council on policy development, while getting involved with state affairs, including water quality issues.
During his time at Aurora, he experienced the demise of the Two Forks project, when it was vetoed by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1990. He describes a “black, dark cloud” that descended for Aurora and other project proponents whose water supply plans were thrown into uncertainty. “The future and what people had been working on intensively for a decade wasn’t going to happen. It became clear that whatever was going to happen would require a rethinking of water policy.”
With other large water supply projects similarly stalled or failing, and recognizing the need for a new approach and new skills, Doug attended courses at the Harvard Program on Negotiation taught by the co-authors of Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher and Bill Ury. There, he learned about finding common ground, managing conflict, and working with diverse interests to get things done. “To me, that was magic.”
He also went through training in collaborative decision-making at (now-called) CDR Associates in Boulder and consent-building at the Institute for Participatory Management and Planning run by Hans and Annemarie Bleiker. “I believe it is important to keep learning throughout one’s career. There is often a better way of finding optimal solutions to conflict and that can begin with a deep understanding of the points of view of others,” explains Doug.
“Those things became the core of my life, they guided how I spent my career,” where Doug says his proudest accomplishments involved working with local communities to take difficult situations and make them better. This work included developing several intergovernmental agreements in a variety of Colorado’s geographic areas such as the Eagle River headwaters, Upper Arkansas Valley, Lower Arkansas Valley and the Denver metro area.
Some of Doug’s earliest inspirations as a leader came from his parents and his secondary education. The youngest of three children, Doug was raised outside of Atlanta, Georgia, by a mother and father who each swung above their weight. Neither had obtained more than a high school diploma, but both held substantive leadership roles. His mother, Polly, disappointed by the quality of public schools in the vicinity, started and ran a K-7 private school, affiliated with the Methodist Church. His father, Howard, rose to be the Regional Marketing Manager for Amoco Oil Company – Southeast.
For high school, Doug attended an all-male private college prep school with a mandatory Junior Air Force ROTC program. He describes it as a “pretty rigid” environment.
During his junior year, Doug ran for student council president on a platform that he summarizes as, “We need a military but let’s make it optional, and let’s go co-ed. “The social environment is much better for teenage boys when the other half of society is equally present. And I think that still applies in adult life!”
In the end, he lost the race to the captain of football team. Still, two years after graduating, the school adopted both of his proposals – changing tradition going back to 1906.
“A value I learned from that,” says Doug, “is that you can advocate for change, but you don’t have to be there to see it happen. It was the right thing to do at the time and the school has flourished.”
After toying with the idea of pursuing architecture—he decided to pursue an engineering degree in environmental and water resources at Vanderbilt University.
Degree in hand, he went to work for about two years for the State of Tennessee’s Air Pollution Control Division. It was during a time when people were raising the alarm about acid rain, holes in the ozone layer, and, surprisingly, the opposite of global warming. “Some scientists were concerned that airborne particulates would reflect sunlight and cause the climate to cool,” Doug explains.
After some soul searching, Doug recognized he’d rather work on addressing problems from the inside-out, rather than as a regulator or as an external advocate. So he began exploring other options. Remembering back to a class in his freshman year (1973) where the dilemma of an over-appropriated Colorado River, and the inherent math problems of the Colorado River Compact, had been discussed. “I thought to myself, ‘What an interesting problem!’ Not that I had a solution.”
Setting his sights on Colorado, Doug searched the Yellow Pages and sent resumes to every company he could find. Out of 60 resumes, he got eight bites. He took what little vacation time he had and drove to Denver with buddies in his 1979 Honda Civic to spend a week in interviews. After hearing nothing but “No’s” due to the water background he lacked, Doug went to his final interview. “He looked at me, glanced down at my resume, looked back up and said ‘I apologize, but I totally misread your resume.’ Upon seeing I was somewhat crestfallen and noticing I had a beard, he said: ‘Hey, you’ve got a beard. I have a friend who has a firm, and they all have beards; maybe you would fit in there.’ He picked up his phone, called the firm’s owner, and I ended up getting that one last chance.”
Doug landed the job with Envirologic Systems, a small consulting firm primarily working with the mining industry. “They paid to move me out here, but the company didn’t take off as expected, and eight months later they were going out of business.”
It was another inflection point. Doug decided to pursue more education, obtaining a Master’s degree in Civil Engineering – Water Resources from University of Colorado-Boulder. Seeking the advice of his advisor, Doug was introduced to one of his advisor’s former students, Dan Ault, then with Rocky Mountain Consultants. “Dan said to me, ‘This is water. It’s not like regular engineering. It’s unstructured. There is water law. Some science. There is policy. Are you really sure you want to do this?’ I said to him, ‘Yes, this is perfect!’” This was 1982.
For the next four years, Doug worked for Dan in doing what he describes as “all kinds of cutting-edge work,” ranging from water transfers, to streamflow gain and loss studies, well pumping studies, Historic Consumptive Use analysis for agriculture, and ditch analysis.
Despite having such a rewarding experience working with Dan, and later with Don Deere, the partner who went on to form Deere & Ault Consultants, Doug realized he was ready for new pastures. When he saw the opening at Aurora Water, he took it.
“I’ve had the general philosophy in my career of riding the pony until I come to the end of the trail,” says Doug.
At Aurora Water, Doug also met and married Jill Piatt Kemper. He has two children from his first marriage. His son, Ben, is in the Air Force Special Forces and lives with his wife and four children—they’re expecting their fifth—in Monterey, California. His daughter, Cayla, and her husband, Justin, live in Westminster, where she works as a project manager for a renewable energy company.
Thinking ahead to retirement, Doug says he looks forward to “letting things roll and having a clear calendar for a while.” As an elder in his church, he will continue working on building church vitality with a focus on racism and poverty issues. He is taking lessons in marimba, a percussion instrument. Doug and Jill plan to resume traveling to some of their favorite destinations around the globe.
He also hopes to stay involved in Colorado water, a community he’s proud to be part of. “A lot that’s talked about with water is conflict,” he says, “but the real story of Colorado’s water community is how well we have risen to meet the challenges of the day. Our journey is a joy.”
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