By Meg McGuire
Kristen Bowman Kavanagh is the new executive director of the Delaware River Basin Commission. So new, in fact, that her name is still on the door of her old office and not yet on her new office.
So, she’s still dividing her time between her new office at the DRBC’s headquarters in West Trenton, N.J., and her old one down the hall. She spent five years as deputy director, having been appointed to the new job starting on Dec. 1.
For this interview, I asked her to explain what the DRBC is, since it seems to confuse so many people.
“Well,” she said, seeming to grant permission to be a little confused, “I understand it differently than I did five years ago.” She explained that the DRBC has a complicated role to fill in the basin and one that is frequently misunderstood.
Likely the confusion arises since the commissioners are the governors of the four states (Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Delaware) and the commander of the North Atlantic Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, though none of those are usually in attendance at the meetings where decisions are made. Their representatives cast votes for the governors and for the federal government. Neither the executive director nor the staff at the DRBC make decisions — the commissioners do.
She likes to explain it as a wheel, with the DRBC at the center and the four states and the federal government (represented by the United States Army Corps of Engineers) as spokes in the wheel.
“The DRBC is not independent, rather it is a mediator for the states and federal government to look after the water resources of the basin for the good of all stakeholders.”
Put it another way, Kavanagh said: “They are not them. They are we.” (Think about it.)
“It’s as if we are a separate department of each state and of the federal government. We’re not a completely separate entity.”
Read Meg McGuire’s entire article in Delaware Currents here.