The announcement that Karl Dreher, who has run Idaho's water resource department for a decade, will not last into the Butch Otter administration, sent a shock and a chill around much of Idaho's water community. Dreher had done a sound job and was broadly respected; at a time when so many key water decisions are hanging, who could say what would happen now?
![]() Dave Tuthill |
With the announcement by Otter of Dave Tuthill as interim - and maybe permanent - director, a good many of those concerns should be set to rest.
We say that with some confidence because, over most of the last decade, we've watched Tuthill at close range. Among our publications is the Snake River Basin Adjudication Digest, and Tuthill for most of the last decade - until his promotion a year or so ago - was the water department administrator most directly responsible for overseeing its work in moving the adjudication forward.
And has done so remarkably. Not just him, certainly (Dreher was doubtless more than a small factor). But a department of water resources that had previously butted heads repeatedly with the courts turned closely cooperative. Thousands of tangled battles over water right claims, and differences between state analyses and local expectations, were worked out smoothly under Tuthill's watch. More than a hundred thousand water right claims in a state prickly about water have been moved most of the way through the system, and only rarely with a flareup.
Tuthill is a skilled organizer and a diplomat as well. Monthly, for a good many years, he delivered update reports on the status of the SRBA to the court and other interested watchers (often including us). These presentations (the PowerPoints are available on line at the IDWR site) were often delivered in travelling road shows, sometimes before skeptical locals uneasy about what the state bureaucrats from Boise were going to do to their water. Tuthill made sure they were listened to.
The Otter announcement noted this about Tuthill: "Tuthill currently is administrator of the Idaho Department of Water Resources’ Water Management Division. He also has been chief of the agency’s Adjudication Bureau, and manager of its Western Region office. With a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Idaho, Tuthill retired in 2004 as a colonel from the U.S. Army Reserve Corps of Engineers after 30 years of military service." All useful and relevant; but his most pertinent skills aren't the kind that translate so easily on paper.
The appointment is interim, and a search for a permanent director is expected to get underway soon. But Otter may find, in the weeks ahead, he already has who he needs.