This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “Managing a water utility during a water crisis with Jim Lochhead.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

Jim Lochhead: The threats that we face in Colorado on the Colorado River affect all of Colorado, and it’s not a West Slope or an East Slope issue. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Hello and welcome to CSU’s Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University’s Spur Campus in Denver, Colorado, 

Jim Lochhead: And you can think about those reservoirs as a bank account, and that bank account has been drawn down to the point where it is depleted and there’s unfortunately no line of credit that we can draw on, no borrowing that we can do. Once that water is gone, it’s gone. 

Jocelyn Hittle: On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health, and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. I’m Jocelyn Hittle, associate Vice Chancellor of the CSU Spur Campus, and I’m honored to be joined today by Jim Lochhead, CEO and manager of Denver Water, which supplies drinking water to Denver and the surrounding suburbs. 

Prior to his tenure at Denver Water, which began in 2010, Jim held a variety of positions including working in private law practice on natural resource issues in the US and globally, and as the executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. Jim was the Colorado Governor’s representative on interstate Colorado River operations, and served on the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the Boards of Great Outdoors Colorado, the Nature Conservancy, and the Colorado Conservation Trust. Jim has a bachelor’s degree in environmental biology and a law degree from the University of Colorado. Welcome, Jim. 

Jim Lochhead: Thanks, Jocelyn. It’s good to see you again. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Likewise. So as I was reading through your bio, there was a distinct theme around natural resources and particularly water, not surprisingly, which has led you to your role at Denver Water, and that’s where I’d like to start. Can you tell us a little bit more about Denver Water? 

Jim Lochhead: Denver Water is the state’s largest water utility and oldest water utility. We serve about 25% of the state’s population, but we only use about 2% of the state’s water. So we’re big, but we don’t have a big footprint, and we do everything we can to minimize that footprint across the state and across the west. 

We serve a million and a half customers, both in the city and county of Denver as well as surrounding suburbs. And we have really a vast, complex and really amazing system. We divert about half of our water supply from the Colorado River, about half from the South Platte River. Our Colorado River Supply comes from the Blue River near Silver Thorn and Dillon. Water’s diverted through the Robert’s Tunnel into the South Plat Basin. And then we also take water from Grand County up near the Winter Park ski area. We bring water through the Moffitt Tunnel into four different treatment plants, and one big brand new one, which is coming online early next year. And a big network of conduits, pipes, mains that are incredibly complex, hard to maintain. And just about every day we have a main break and are flooding somebody’s basement or something, but we try and prevent that. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Sure, of course. Also, of course, it’s very complicated, providing drinking water for the largest metropolitan area in the state and all of the complexity that comes with that means that the organization itself is also quite complex. It looks like about 1100 employees and covering more of the state than just the front range. You have 4,000 square miles of watershed that feed together to bring water to the Denver Metro. So, how do you manage some of that complexity? 

Jim Lochhead: It’s really an amazing business. People turn on their tap, water comes out and they don’t think about it. But we’re heavily into the construction business. We do a lot of construction, both replacement and renewal and expansion of our system. As you mentioned, we have 4,000 square miles of watershed area. We have employees throughout the state at outlying areas. Everything from billing to accounting to management operations, it’s really amazingly complex. It’s not like a business where you’re producing widgets and selling them somewhere. It’s really all facets of business and operations that are involved. 

I’ve been doing this for 13 years and I’m still learning aspects of this system. A lot of our employees have been with Denver Water for decades. There’s a lot of institutional knowledge, and it’s kind of common folklore that you’re not really an employee until you’ve been there for 20 or 30 years. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Understood. So, you learn a lot every day in a system that’s that complicated and that complex. How does Denver Water and the water system here in the city compare to other major metropolitan areas? What do we do differently and what’s basically the same across utilities? 

Jim Lochhead: One of the things that we’re proud of that we have done is we’ve instituted a continuous improvement process. We’ve employed the lean technology, which was developed originally by Toyota. It’s designed to increase efficiency by eliminating waste in every process that we do. 

The idea is to deliver water at the lowest possible cost to our customers while still maintaining the integrity of our system. And so we’ll have employees do what are called rapid improvement events where they will come and look at a particular process, both the process itself as well as upstream and downstream impacts. They actually spend a week with that process doing rapid experiments about asking questions, why do we do it this way? Can we do it differently? They do experiments to actually do it differently. And by the end of the week, we’re implementing changes to that process to increase efficiency. 

We’re very metric driven. We have a number of measurements of our operations, and we’re constantly looking at how we can improve. I think that we’re one of the leading utilities in the country, if not in the world, in terms of our implementation of this continuous improvement ethic. 

We’re also deeply committed to stewardship of the resources that supply our system. As we talked about the 4,000 square miles of watershed area, a lot of that’s in National Forest. A lot of it has been devastated by catastrophic wildfire. A lot of it is forest area that is subject to beetle kill overgrowth. And so we’re engaged with the United States Forest Service on a program called Forest de Faucets, whereby we are both investing in treatments to the forest that will prevent damages caused by catastrophic wildfire. 

We’re involved with a number of watershed projects, stream improvement projects in the West slope, and it’s our ethic that we need to sustain the water supply that we depend on not only today, but for our customers 50 or a hundred years from now. And so that means protecting that environment and those watersheds that sustain our system. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So let’s talk a little bit more about where the water comes from. So, that 4,000 miles of square miles of watershed means that a drop of water that falls in that area, whether it’s a raindrop or a snowflake, then makes its way eventually through some of the tunnels that you mentioned and diversions from one part of the state, the western slope or the western part of the state to the front range, for example. 

Can you talk a little bit more about where does this water come from? You talk about people turning the tap on and not realizing all of the things that go into it. Where does that come from? What pressures or what risks do we have around that supply? 

Jim Lochhead: Denver is really in a unique place. I mentioned that we get half of our water supply from the Colorado River Basin. We’re at the headwaters, obviously, of the Colorado River. That river supply seven states and the country of Mexico. We also derive our water supply from the South Platte Basin. The South Platte Basin flows into the Missouri and ultimately the Mississippi. So, we’re right at the focal point of literally the entire Western United States. And we’re impacted by everything that happens from climate change to drought, to political issues, to endangered species management. We’re involved in endangered species protection programs both in the Colorado River Basin and in the South Platte Basin. And so, literally everything that happens across the west potentially impacts Denver water and the water supply to our customers. 

As a result, we are heavily engaged in discussions among states with the federal government about water management, drought resiliency, watershed management. And it makes the job really interesting because it’s not just running an operation, but it’s being engaged in public policy and the politics of water. 

Jocelyn Hittle: And I think that might surprise people to understand that there is so much around policy and politics that is part of the work of a utility. Can you say a little bit more about that piece of it, and particularly the Colorado River conversations that have been so much in the news over the course of the last couple of years? 

Jim Lochhead: Well, we can start right here in Colorado. Most of the people in Colorado are on the Eastern slope. Most of the water in Colorado is on the Western slope. And so as a result, there’s been this historic tension between the Western slope and the Eastern slope about diversions from the West slope to the East slope. 

I spent 35 years of my law practice in Glenwood Springs, and so I know all about the West Slope. Coming to Denver, I brought that perspective here and have sought to create a bind, a bond between Western Colorado and Eastern Colorado, particularly when it comes to interstate Colorado River issues. We’re one state. The threats that we face in Colorado on the Colorado River affect all of Colorado, and it’s not a West slope or an East slope issue. So we’ve really tried to come together around that issue in particular, as a state. 

The situation on the Colorado is literally at a crisis point. There are two major reservoirs on the river, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. And over the last 20 years, those reservoirs have been drawn down as a result of the worst drought in 1200 years on the river. They’ve been drawn down to the point that in the next couple of years, it’s possible that they could literally go dry. 

And yet at the same time, the lower basin states, particularly California and Arizona, have continued to use water and draw down those water supplies. In contrast, water users in the upper basin in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico, have been limited by both hydrology and the operation of the prior appropriation system. Water rights are set by the date at which they are first used, and it’s literally kind of a pecking order of who gets water based on the first use. And so even though the upper basin has been limited, the lower basin has continued to use the same amount of water. And you can think about those reservoirs as a bank account, and that bank account has been drawn down to the point where it is depleted and there’s unfortunately no line of credit that we can draw on, no borrowing that we can do. 

Once that water is gone, it’s gone. And the results are going to be devastating. And so the economic impact, the environmental impact, the recreational impact are huge. And literally, the water users in each state are kind of looking at each other saying, “Who’s going to give up what first? Before I give up something, well, maybe somebody else should give up something.” And so we’re all kind of playing poker, and in the meantime, the reservoirs are dropping and dropping and dropping to these critical levels. 

The implications for Colorado are the potential for significant lawsuits and litigation, ultimately in the United States Supreme Court. When states sue each other, they sue each other in the United States Supreme Court. And that lawsuit would take literally 10 or 20 years. We don’t have 10 to 20 years to deal with this problem. And so that’s the worst possible scenario. 

Probably the second worst or even the worst scenario is that the river operates by the priorities that are established. The first priority on the river is Mexico. That’s a national obligation. But within the United States, irrigation users in California have the first priority. And in fact, they use far more water than the entire upper basin combined. 

So there’s a potential that if we hit that crisis point and the river operates by that priority, irrigators get their water first, and cities literally go dry because we’re second in line. And that’s obviously an untenable situation. It just cannot happen. And so there needs to be a solution that’s brought in. Given where the states are today, it needs to be a solution that’s brokered or imposed by the federal government. And the federal government has, to date, not done anything about it. So, here we sit with proposals from six states for a solution and one proposal by California, and we’ve all put that in the lap of the Department of the Interior for them to decide what they want, what they’re going to do. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Well, so that’s fascinating. And thank you for that excellent description of what is a very complicated situation that has been unfolding over the last decades as the drought has worsened. I think a lot of people are seeing much more about the Colorado River, hearing more about it and the general news, not even natural resources or water specific sources. It’s hitting the kind of mainstream audience’s attention. So it’s helpful to get an understanding of it. 

How optimistic are you? I heard you say that given where we are right now, the feds have to weigh in. Where the states are, we’ve not been able to come to an agreement among the states without federal intervention. How optimistic are you? And I guess another question might be, how could a Denver citizen or an Arizonan or someone living in Salt Lake City contribute to this in order to try to help make a difference? Because their livelihoods and water sources depend on it. 

Jim Lochhead: There’s only one real solution, and that’s to reduce uses in the basin to be commensurate with how much water the river produces. We not only have to do that, but we have to cut even more in order to build back some of that bank account that we’ve lost in Lakes Powell and Mead. 

The size and scope of those cuts are enormous. The river over the last 20 years has produced about an average of about 12 million acre feet a year. The federal government last year asked the states to cut between two and four million acre feet. So a two to four million acre foot cut out of 12 million acre feet is a lot of water. 

What we have in the basin is a grass problem. There is a lot of irrigated agriculture of alfalfa and forage crops that are used both domestically and also exported to the far East. And yet, the Colorado River only produces about 7% of the alfalfa used in the United States. So even though it’s big from a water use standpoint within the Colorado River Basin, it’s not terribly significant nationally in terms of how much alfalfa is being produced. 

We also have a problem with grass in our cities. Bluegrass, turf-grass has been prolific. And in fact, in our service area here in Denver, we’ve looked at what we call non-functional turf, which the easiest way to think about non-functional turf is grass that only sees a lawnmower. Nobody ever uses it. We just look at it. Think of medians or other areas that you drive through Denver and you just see grass that’s sitting there that nobody uses. 

We estimate there’s some 6,000 acres of non-functional turf in our service area. If you multiply that by Phoenix and LA and Las Vegas, by the way, has done a tremendous job of reducing non-functional turf. But all the large municipalities in the basin, that can make a real difference. And so I think that we can all contribute not only through conservation, reuse, recycling, but also simply by reducing demands in the system, both agriculturally and in our urban service areas. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So you mentioned Las Vegas doing a good job of reducing the amount of non-functional turf that they have. Is that something that’s in Denver water’s sights? 

Jim Lochhead: In response to the secretary’s call for these deep cuts in use in the basin, we organized a group of municipalities to sign a memorandum of understanding. We’ve, to date, gotten some 35 different municipalities in the Colorado River Basin to sign on to this MOU. It commits us to enhancing our efforts toward conservation, redoubling our efforts toward recycling and reuse, and commits each of us to a 30% reduction in the amount of non-functional turf within our service areas. 

We also need to work with municipalities and with the state to make sure that new development that occurs in Colorado doesn’t incorporate that non-functional turf. So we’re going to be embarking on a program to remove non-functional turf within our service area. We’re starting with our own facilities. So if you see a pump station or a Denver water facility with some grass on it, within the next few years, that grass won’t be there. It will be replaced by native vegetation. And that’s important as well. 

We can’t just remove turf and kill our tree canopy, for example. The tree canopy in Denver is incredibly important from an economic, climate change, as well as social aspect. We need to maintain those trees. We also can’t replace turf with rocks or concrete. It needs to be with climate appropriate native vegetation that is really actually incredibly attractive. And then we also need to be aware of underserved communities in our service area, a lot of which don’t have functional turf, much less non-functional turf. And so we need to be making sure that we provide green landscaping. Again, climate appropriate in those underserved areas as well. 

Jocelyn Hittle: And I think that’s an area where we have some mutual interest, right? CSU has a horticultural program that’s focused on things like this, and I think we’re certainly interested in helping to make that transition be something that people are really excited about. And I certainly am eager to replace the curb strip in front of my house that only sees my lawnmower and probably less often than it should with something else that is appropriate for the climate that we’re in and the changes that we’re going to continue to see. 

So, I’d like to shift gears a little bit to talk about what a day in the life is like for you as the CEO and manager of the Denver Water. Can you talk us through maybe a day or a week in the life? 

Jim Lochhead: One of the great things I love about this job is getting up, I don’t know what’s going to happen next. So that keeps me on my toes. That having been said, we talked about the complexity of the operation of Denver Water. So, we are in the process of building a brand new state-of-the-art treatment plant on Highway 93 between Golden and Boulder. And the conceptualization of that plant, the planning for that plant was a process that we went through that I was heavily engaged in. I challenged our team to attempt to build a water treatment plant that was off the electric grid. And the engineers looked at me like I was crazy. They said, “We shouldn’t do that, we can’t do that.” And I said, “Well, why don’t you try?” So they went and instead of just building a standard treatment plant, they looked at how they could do that. 

And today that plant is, it is going to be hooked up to the electric grid, but the reason is that it’s going to be a net energy producer. We’re actually putting energy back into the grid from that plant for the treatment of water. 

We built a new state-of-the-art campus that is the most sustainable campus that’s been developed in Colorado. Our administration building is lead platinum, net-zero energy. We do rainwater capture. We treat our own wastewater within the building, reuse it for irrigation, toilet flushing. And the planning of that took several years. The permitting of that took several years. 

We’re constructing an enlargement to Gross Reservoir up in Boulder County. That process took about 20 years to obtain the approvals necessary, including six years of negotiation with the Western slope on a landmark peace accord between Denver Water and the Western Slope about how they could actually support and how environmental groups could support the enlargement of that reservoir. 

We are also embarking on a program to remove every lead service line within our system. We were engaged in complex negotiations with the state health department and the EPA on our treatment processes. Service line is the line between the water main that’s out in the street and your house. And that service line is not owned by Denver Water, it’s owned by the homeowner. We have some 64,000 to 84,000 of those lead service lines. And we know from the experiences in Flint and other communities around the country that those service lines pose a health risk to our customers. Public health is ultimately our primary responsibility. And so we took it upon ourselves to reach an agreement with the EPA, whereby we committed at no direct cost to our individual homeowners, to replace every single lead service line within our system within a 15-year period. 

We’re now three years into that program. We’ve successfully met every benchmark that the EPA has given us under a variance that the issue to allow us to do this. We’re not only removing the lines, but we’re providing pitcher filters to any home that has a line or is suspected of having a line. We’ve changed the treatment of our water, which is a separate, very complex process to provide better protection. And we’ve embarked on a really extensive community engagement program. We’ve created a national model for proactive engagement in protecting public health in removing these lines. 

We’ve also partnered with CSU in the construction and development and now up and running hydro building at the Spur campus, which we’re terribly excited about. You mentioned partnership with horticulture, but there are so many different partnerships between an urban utility and a land-grant university, building the connection between watersheds and agricultural production, as well as the concepts of how water is used within our urban environment. 

We’ve located our brand new water quality lab at the Hydro building. We undertake about 200,000 water samples per year at that lab. And it’s not only a fantastic facility, but that lab is a great opportunity to be in an environment with a great university and to engage in public education and research and innovation, and ultimately in broad public policy around water. So, the future is really bright for that partnership as well. 

So, those are kind of a few of the major initiatives that I work on. We’re also very committed to the development of our workforce and the leaders within the organization. So I’m very engaged in leadership programs. We have a broad DENI initiative within Denver Water. 

And so all the day-to-day operations, I’m involved in several national boards. We engage with other water utilities across the country in learning and collaboration. We’re engaged at the legislature, we’re engaged in Congress, on national legislation, regulatory issues at both the state and the federal level. So, every day is filled with all kinds of different and unique and fun challenges. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yep. I heard you say policy and legislative work, construction, negotiations, water quality testing, some more construction, and not to mention the management of the core function of what you do, which is with the existing facilities to deliver water to the metro area. So, sounds diverse and quite a lot of work. And that’s, I’m sure, part of the reason you have an 1100 person team to manage to do all of that as you. 

And we’re also thrilled about the partnership at Spur that you mentioned. And of course, I think we don’t even know what will come out of that yet, right? We’re excited about the things we do know we’re going to do together around education, particularly for young people, and conversations around policy. But I think there are, with us cohabitating in that space, I think a lot of opportunity that we don’t even conceive of yet around research and innovation in ways that we can be mutually beneficial, and we’re really thrilled about it. And thanks so much for your partnership over the last, gosh, it’s been, what, seven or eight years. 

So, as you know, at Spur we are focused on inspiring kids to think about careers they’re not currently aware of. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the more surprising careers that are within Denver Water or the utility space. What might we not know about that would be of interest to young people today? 

Jim Lochhead: Well, you mentioned construction, so obviously engineering is a big aspect of what we do, but it’s also an incredibly diverse operation. So, if you are into computers or GIS or accounting, watershed management, recreation, legal, water supply analysis, any kind of technical career, we have all kinds of operations from the people who are in the street at two o’clock in the morning when it’s 30 below, working on a main break, incredibly dedicated people, to emergency responders. You can almost think of any career, and there’s probably an opportunity at a water utility for that career. 

Jocelyn Hittle: With that, let’s talk a little bit about how you got to where you are. So correct me if I’m wrong, but you were born in California. And maybe you can say a little bit about what it was like to grow up in California, and then you came here to Colorado for college, is that correct? 

Jim Lochhead: Right. I grew up in Southern California. And really, love of the water, love of the ocean. Spent a lot of time in the ocean, was a surfer and southern California guy. And that really spurred both my interest in water and the environment. Came to University of Colorado where I graduated with a degree in biology. 

And talk about careers. I wanted to be a high school biology teacher, but I did not do so well on the GREs for biology. So I was kind of despondent, not knowing what I was going to do next. And on a whim decided to take the LSATs to go to law school. And so, that worked out okay. So here I am. And so I found a different path. I had a different aptitude, maybe. 

Practiced law in Glenwood Springs for several years, representing small municipalities as water council, ditch companies, developers. And then was engaged in the Colorado Water Conservation Board, was tapped by Governor Roamer to become the director of the State Department of Natural Resources, which was an incredible job. The Department of Natural Resources overseas not only state water, but public lands, division of Wildlife, division of Parks, Mining. It’s just a incredibly diverse and fun job. 

After my stint there, I joined a Denver law firm, but I was still in Glenwood Springs, and began practicing law across the country doing large, big river negotiations, mediation, really all over the United States. But I missed the sense of mission that comes with an organization. I had that at the Department of Natural Resources. 

But one of the great things about working at a water utility is there’s a deep sense of mission of delivering to our customers every single day high quality water at the right pressure, at et cetera, the right time, the right amounts. Of responding to every situation that comes up and just doing that in the best way possible. That feeling is almost a feeling of family, and it’s almost kind of a first responder mentality among everyone in the organization. And to have the privilege to lead those people who are so dedicated to this is really a tremendous opportunity. And it’s been just a wonderful experience. Probably the thing I’m most fulfilled by in this job are the people that I work with, and that sense of purpose and mission that they bring to work every day. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, I can understand that sense of mission. You are providing something that is necessary for people to live their lives and do their work here in the largest metropolitan area in the state and one of the larger metropolitan areas in the west. So I could imagine that that is quite fulfilling to feel that every day you’re sort of making the rest of our lives possible. 

Can you talk a little bit about, have there been other moments? So you mentioned also that the GRE wasn’t as successful as the LSAT. So that sort of pointed you in a specific direction. And then you were appointed by Governor Roamer, so that also was a bit of a pivot moment. Are there other moments that were pivot moments or people that were particularly influential as you went from thinking about being a high school biology teacher to where you are now today? 

Jim Lochhead: Well, I’ve always been interested in, again, the environment, public policy, politics. For example, I was an intern for Tim Worth when he was a senator, or no, he was in Congress at the time. And so the influence of those people, and Governor Roamer was really a tremendous influence on me. Because he not only allowed me to do what I wanted to do to further the mission of the Department of Natural Resources supporting that, but he approached everything from the standpoint, not of politics, but of doing the right thing for the state of Colorado. We would sit in his office and he was always trying to think of what is best for the future of this state without regard to politics. That was a time, obviously quite different than today. He had a Republican legislature. We worked quite well with the Republican legislature. Obviously disagreements, but they were hashed out. And again, it was always what is best. 

So that really was a big influence on the way that I have approached my career and my job, particularly Denver Water, because we’re clearly not a political organization. One of the great things about Denver Water is it was created in 1918 under the city charter in the wake of failed private water companies. You mentioned sustaining a great metropolitan area. These private water companies were competing with each other. There was flooding, there were water quality problems, there were water quantity problems. And the people of Denver created Denver Water with this vision of a great city. But it was created to be apolitical. We don’t report to the city council. I report to a board, five member board, appointed by the mayor. And we operate independently. We’re part of the city, but we operate independently as an enterprise. And specifically, it was created so that we could have that long-term vision, not be subject to politics, and could do our job and do it well. 

Jocelyn Hittle: That’s great. And it sounds like Governor Roamer was part of the influence of why that’s important to you, the fact that you’re working in a place that is apolitical and has that long-term view. 

Jim Lochhead: Absolutely. Yeah, I’ve always felt that in the natural resource field, everybody who’s involved in natural resources, whether it’s in research or the political policy realm, we’re always thinking 50, 100 years from now and how we can meet the challenges of climate change and the environment going forward for future generations. And it’s a thinking that permeates Denver Water as well. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So, with that long-term view in mind, you are actually wrapping your time up at Denver Water. You’ll be leaving Denver Water here in the coming months. So, can you tell us a little bit about what you hope you’re leaving behind there? What do you hope your legacy at Denver Water is? 

Jim Lochhead: We’ve accomplished a tremendous amount during my tenure. I presided over it, but it’s 1100 people that are working that have achieved, I think so much in the last 13 years that I’ve been at Denver Water. I mentioned some of the construction projects that we’ve done. We’ve also created… I also mentioned the ethic of continuous improvement and measurement of what we do as kind of a leading practice in the water utility industry. Achieving that was not easy in a culture that frankly was, “Well, if it costs this much more, we can just raise rates and that’s okay.” 

Well, it’s not okay, because that’s part of our mission is to keep our rates as low as possible, but also maintain the integrity of our system. And so how can we create a culture of service to our customers and thinking about our customers in everything that we do in terms of the cost, our service to them, making sure that that water supply is there. 

And there has been a real transformation internally within Denver Water over the last 13 years toward that ethic of continuous improvement in customer service and sustaining the communities that we serve, and also the integrity of the environment that supplies our water. We just recently refreshed our strategic plan. When I came to Denver Water, we really didn’t have a strategic plan, and now everything we do is tied to specific strategic objectives of our plan. 

And so that plan will, I hope, continue to guide Denver Water going forward over the next several years. And I hope that the next person, the next leader of Denver Water can build on that and create an even better and greater organization. I feel that the time, every CEO needs to pick an appropriate moment to step aside. And I think this is the appropriate moment for me because we’ve accomplished so much. Everything is running really well, knock on wood. And it’s a great opportunity for new thinking to come in and take us the next step forward. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Thanks. Well, I know that you will be missed not only at Denver Water, but across the city and the state and across the American West. So, thank you very much for all of your service. What will you do next? What’s coming? 

Jim Lochhead: That’s a really good question. I don’t know. I definitely am not retiring, so I won’t be mowing non-functional turf or doing something like that. I’ll be looking for the next thing, obviously something in water and natural resources, but TBD. 

Jocelyn Hittle: All right. You heard it here folks, Jim Lockhead is looking for a job. So, wonderful. Thank you very much. Just to wrap us up, maybe you can tell us where we can find out more about Denver Water’s great work. I assume Denver Water’s website, but where else? 

Jim Lochhead: Yep. denverwater.org. We are also on social media, so you can follow us on whatever social media platform. I don’t think we’re on TikTok, but whatever social media platform. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Great, thanks. 

So, you touched on this, but my spur of the moment question for you is, you mentioned you wanted to be a high school biology teacher, but aside from that, is there any other career path that you could have seen yourself take? 

Jim Lochhead: Well, one of the career paths, well, I mentioned my love of the ocean. So I had this dream of being a marine biologist and working at say Scripps or Santa Barbara and spending a lot of time in the water studying the ocean. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Amazing. That sounds wonderful. It’s not too late. 

Jim Lochhead: That could be my next job. 

Jocelyn Hittle: There you go. Marine biologist. 

Jim Lochhead: Yeah. 

Jocelyn Hittle: I love it. That’s wonderful. It takes you back to the biology route of everything, too. 

Well, thank you very much, Jim Lockhead. Our pleasure and honor to have you on Spur of the Moment today. Thank you very much, and good luck in the next chapter. 

Jim Lochhead: Thank you. Good to be with you. 

Jocelyn Hittle: The CSU Spur of the Moment podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson, and our theme music is by Ketsa. Please visit the show notes for links mentioned in this episode. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.