8
APPLE ORCHARDS AND WATER RIGHTS, from page 7
sprint (and I’m always on the hunt for a metaphor because I really don’t enjoy running!). If the offer came tomorrow to skip this part of my career and move another notch up the ladder, I wouldn’t want to take it. This is a great time to sort out a sustainable career/life balance and work out what management tools fit my style of leadership and help me meet my goals. TZL: Early in your career, what project seemed to be the most daunting, and why? What did you learn by meeting the challenge? TD: The first contract I brought in on my own was intim- idating. I scoped the project with a tight budget and, at the end of the project, the client asked for some additional work. Completing that requested work would have pushed my project overbudget. I was surprised by how reluctant I felt asking for a contract change. In my mind, it was just a couple more hours of my time crunching numbers like I do every day and it was difficult to rectify that with the addi- tional money I would have to ask for to cover that time. Stressed about the contract change, I had a long heart-to- heart with my manager about standing behind and valuing my work and time. I’ve carried that forward to my role as a project manager. Developing pump specifications might feel like a casual afternoon activity, but many years of train- ing and practice went into building that skill set and I need to put value on that. TZL: Guitars and water rights legends. Tell us about your interesting hobbies when you are not working. TD: Water Conservancy Board: Washington state water rights play a role in every water infrastructure project I work on. Right away, I was intrigued. Washington became a state in 1889 but didn’t develop a surface water code un- til 1917. The state didn’t regulate groundwater until 1945. There are hundreds of laws and court cases that interweave those three major milestones. Each court case is like a fairy tale or legend – someone tried to do something and some- one else disagreed and some court made a very situation- specific ruling that we now need to extrapolate and apply to every similar case in perpetuity. That situation rides until someone else tries to do something that interacts with that extrapolation and the water code continues to evolve. It is awesome and one year into my job I decided I wanted even more of it. Several counties in Washington state have Conservancy Boards. Conservancy Boards are volunteer boards of three to five members that can process change applications to wa- ter rights within their county and make a preliminary rec- ommendation to the Department of Ecology. This helps Ecology manage a large backlog of change applications. There are some substantial training requirements and time commitments involved, but Conservancy Boards are a great way to stay plugged into water availability locally and to get a glimpse into Ecology’s work process in regulating state water rights.
Taylor Dayton constructs and installs a lake staff gauge in the remote Alpine Lakes Wilderness region.
I must have skimmed the portion of the RCW describing Conservancy Board responsibilities because I was a little surprised when my commission letter thanked me for tak- ing on a six-year term, but I am enjoying the experience. Now I am a small part of some of those legends and I get a front-row seat to many more. Guitars: I can’t hum my way through Happy Birthday with- out my voice cracking and I have never matched a pitch cor- rectly on the first try in my life. I missed the phase of life where I might have found a rock legend to idolize. Some- where along the line, though, I saw a band performand there was moment where the bassist and guitarist exchanged a look and the whole tone of the music changed and evolved. All I could think of is, “How did they do that?” That kicked off a seven-year journey of faking my way through bass player auditions only knowing four notes on my fretboard, being the only adult in a six-month long guitar lesson se- ries populated with hyper critical 9-year-olds, and a stint as the drummer for a band called “Run Fast, We Only Know 3 Songs” that exclusively performed at 5K run events. My partner is a dedicated hobbyist woodworker and I’m full of ideas with very little of the patience required to sand a block of wood with 10 types of sandpaper. With his help, I love building guitars and restoring my weird pawn shop finds. I enjoy learning about the hobbyist builders who cre- ated the iconic guitars that have stuck around for 70 years. There are “vintage correct” paint finishes on some 1950s guitars that sell for tens of thousands of dollars, but when you dig into the story behind them, you’ll find the builder was just looking to cut costs and grabbed a pallet of old paint leftover from unpopular car colors from the next door auto shop’s garbage can. There’s something great about that.
Q&A WITH THE ZWEIG LETTER Do you know someone who should be featured in The Zweig Letter ? Contact Sara Parkman at sparkman@zweiggroup.com for the chance to highlight your firm.
© Copyright 2019. Zweig Group. All rights reserved.
THE ZWEIG LETTER July 22, 2019, ISSUE 1305
Made with FlippingBook Annual report