Leadership Quote by Ken Salazar

Salazar’s line is diplomacy in a hard hat: a promise of uplift that studiously avoids naming the knife fight. “All the interested parties” sounds inclusive, even civic-minded, but it also flattens a landscape of unequal power - big agriculture, municipal growth, upstream-rights holders, federal agencies, tribal and environmental interests - into a single roundtable where everyone is presumed to bargain in good faith. That phrasing is the tell. It signals he’s not here to arbitrate winners and losers; he’s here to keep the room from exploding.

“Develop a solution” is classic political engineering language: technocratic, forward-looking, conveniently vague about tradeoffs. Water politics in the Arkansas River basin isn’t a shortage problem so much as an allocation problem, where “additional water” can mean expensive infrastructure, storage, conservation, transfers, or simply political muscle applied to existing rights. By promising “additional” supply, Salazar sidesteps the most unpopular message in the West: some users will have to take less.

The emotional payload sits in “helps the lower Arkansas River communities thrive again.” “Again” quietly admits decline - economic, agricultural, demographic - without pointing a finger at upstream diversions, drought, or the legal architecture of prior appropriation that rewards those who got there first. It’s an appeal to restoration, not revolution: revive communities without rewriting the rules. The intent is coalition-building under scarcity, wrapping a zero-sum contest in the language of shared recovery so no one has to publicly concede they’re holding the bag.