Interview of Sam Brownback, December 2, 2024

Interviewed by Rex Buchanan

Interview Description

Sam Brownback reviews his service to Kansas beginning with his time as Kansas Secretary of Agriculture and extending through his terms as Governor. Brownback credits his upbringing on a farm in Linn County for development of his views on conservation and resource management. He recalled dealing with the farm crisis and water issues, particularly those involving the Ogallala Aquifer, during his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture. He described carrying his concern for water into his terms as Governor as a vision focused on long-term sustainability for the Ogallala. He also recalled using extensive public consultations to further policy changes such as helping to eliminate the "use it or lose it" mentality in the approach to groundwater usage. Brownback described himself as a strong advocate for wind power, supporting development of wind farms, particularly in the central and western regions of the state. He also described extending the protection of the Flint Hills from wind farm development. In the interview, Brownback highlighted his pragmatic approach to policymaking and relationships developed during his public service career.

Highlights -- short excerpts from the interview

Interviewee Biographical Sketch

Sam Brownback is a native Kansan who was born in Garnett and grew up on a family farm in Linn County. He graduated from Kansas State University with a degree in agricultural economics and from the University of Kansas School of Law. Prior to being elected Governor, he served as the Kansas Secretary of Agriculture and represented Kansas in both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. He left the office of Governor during his second term to accept a presidential appointment to serve as the U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, an office he held from 2018 through 2021.

Transcript

Rex Buchanan: Good morning. I’m Rex Buchanan, former director of the Kansas Geological Survey. Today is December 2, 2024. We’re here at the Kansas Statehouse to interview Sam Brownback who served as Kansas Governor from 2011 to 2018. Our volunteer videographer is former Representative Dave Heinemann.

Sam Brownback is a native Kansan who was born in Garnett and grew up on a family farm in Linn County. He graduated from Kansas State University[(K-State)] with a degree in agricultural economics and from the University of Kansas School of Law. Prior to being elected Governor, he served as the Secretary of Agriculture and represented Kansas in both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. He left the office of Governor during his second term to accept a presidential appointment to serve as the U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, an office he held from 2018 through 2021.

This interview is part of the Kansas Oral History Project’s series examining the development of public policy at the nexus of energy and environment during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In these interviews, we explore those policies through the eyes of former elected officials, experts, executives, administrators, environmentalists, and others. The Kansas Oral History Project is a nonprofit corporation that collects and preserves oral history of Kansans. The project is supported by donations from generous individuals and grants from Every and ITC Great Plains.

Good morning, Governor, and thank you for agreeing to contribute to this project.

Sam Brownback: I’m happy to join you. Good to see you again.

RB: I appreciate you taking the time. Let’s start maybe a little further back before your time as Governor. Let’s go back to Secretary of Agriculture. Did that position come about because of your farm background? How do you move into that role? Talk about that a little bit.

SB: Oh, gosh. I think it was a combination of things as many things are. One was my agricultural background. But I had also been a state and national officer of Future Farmers [of America], and that had traveled me around the state. I was an agricultural law specialist at K-State along with my private practice that I had in Manhattan, and that took me into a lot of agricultural issues, that teaching and extension and that. That was also the farm crisis era where we were losing more farmers and banks, farm banks, than we had at any time probably since the Great Depression. So, I was out talking about what you could do to preserve the farm and some different things along that line with the legal background. I knew the agriculture community in the state.

Then I had a lucky break. We had our first daughter. She was probably two months old at the time, and my wife was there with me. Our daughter threw up on my wife, as they’re wont to do when they’re that age. The Board of Agriculture was interviewing me at that time. They said, “Well, we’d like to meet your wife,” and my wife, she had told me, “Look, I don’t want to go in” because our daughter just threw up on her. I said, “Well, she’s taking care of the kids, the child.” They said, “We’d really like to meet her.” I said, “Well, she really doesn’t want to—we’re taking care of this daughter, and the daughter threw up on her, and she’s embarrassed about that.” They went, “Oh, we’ve all got grandkids. Don’t worry about it. Bring her on in.” I think that sealed the deal, the personal nature of that and our oldest daughter throwing up on my wife.

RB: You don’t very often hear a throw-up story being referred to as a lucky break. [laughter] But that role as Secretary of Ag is important to the water world because the Chief Engineer reports to the Secretary of Agriculture. And the Chief Engineer [in the Division] of Water Resources is kind of central, particularly in water quantity issues. When you took that job, was Dave Pope the Chief Engineer at the time?

SB: He was. Dave was. A great guy.

RB: So, you do this in 1986 is when you took that job.

SB: Yes.

RB: That’s been a while. But what do you remember as the water issues of that time that Dave was dealing with and thus you would have been dealing with as well?

SB: The big one has always been the Ogallala [Aquifer] because we start out in the development of the Ogallala, and it is [commonly considered] “the endless sea of water, and we’ll never run out of water,” and there was mythology involved in it of it’s just run-off from the Rocky Mountains that somehow gets underground, and it’s going to be always supplied by snowfall.

Then as we got to understand the Ogallala more and more, we go, “It’s not endless. We’re using it way too fast.” But by then, you’ve got a certain momentum about you’re using it, the machinery’s in place, it’s the flood irrigation, the big pivots there, and meanwhile the level is just dropping dramatically.

So, I’m looking at this and thinking, “This is something we’ve really got to start to address.” And everybody warned me, “No, don’t address this! This is the kiss of death.” And if I heard it once, I heard it a hundred times, “Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting, and we fight over these things. If you even talk about limiting the use of water, you’re going to be in trouble.” But I’m looking at it going, “We don’t have any future if we keep going this way. We’ve got to do something.”

So, towards the end of the term when I was Agriculture Secretary, we started a water commission or a committee of western Kansans who are over the Ogallala saying, “What can we do to preserve and protect or conserve and extend the Ogallala?” It was a very controversial group. I was young and naive enough to think you could go ahead and wade into it and try to get something done. But that was really the start of it.

It also laid the groundwork for me as Governor that once I finished being Secretary of Agriculture, the thing that I really—or I was kicked out of that job by the courts—the thing that really stuck in my mind was I just didn’t get much done on water, and we’ve got a huge problem. We’ve got to do more. That was the one area while I was Ag Secretary that I lamented we didn’t get more done.

RB: I’ll come back to your time as Governor and the water visioning process and all of that stuff, but before we go away from Secretary of Ag, was that during the time when dedicated water plan funding took place in the legislature?

SB: It was.

RB: Were you engaged in that? In a lot of the interviews we’ve done with legislators as part of this series, particularly the water part of it, we’ve talked about how difficult it was to get that dedicated funding for the water plan.

SB: Yes.

RB: Were you engaged in that as Secretary? What’s your memory of that?

SB: I was, but that was primarily Mike Hayden’s accomplishment. I was all supportive of it. We need to do something here to really start to address this issue, but Mike Hayden drove that train. I think all the credit for that has to go to Governor Hayden and his vision. He had his heart and core as a conservationist.

RB: Right.

SB: He and Teddy Roosevelt would have been close friends, if they had been alive in the same era. But that was his—he got that done.

RB: Before I leave it, when you said kicked out of that job by the courts, was that during the days of the issue about the Board of Agriculture versus the Department of Agriculture lawsuit?

SB: Yes.

RB: Refresh my memory there. I remember that at the time because the Department of Ag was run by an appointed board, and that was challenged as not being constitutional. Remind me of what happened.

SB: It had always been kind of hanging around there as an issue for the last thirty years or so, something like that. The Board of Agriculture that governed the Department of Agriculture is an old Populist model. What they did, the original founders of the state, when they were setting up the Department of Agriculture, they put a Board of Agriculture, who was elected by the farm organizations to run agriculture.

So, it’s a real Populist type of model, and Populism had a very strong strain in Kansas. So, they set up this Board of Agriculture that had lasted 120 years. So, I actually worked for an elected board that was elected by the farm organizations at the annual agriculture meeting. And for years, a number of groups, particularly the groups outside of agriculture, environmental groups in particular, mostly, would threaten to sue it as this violated one man, one vote because you’ve got a general governmental authority here, and yet you’re governed by essentially an industry, and that that shouldn’t survive. We kept, “No, it’s not that bad.” And then you never really—this was me at the time, and I’m trained as a lawyer. I’m looking at this, and I’m going, “This is susceptible to challenge if you abuse your power.” So, I was always one to—just don’t push the cart too fast here on this thing because you can upset it.

Well, we put in place a Pesticide Management District on dealing with atrazine in northeast Kansas around Lake Perry because we had too much atrazine run-off into Lake Perry. We had crafted this proposal. It was tight, just over the drainage areas over Lake Perry, and it worked, but when we went to put it in place, it had to pass the Board of Agriculture. The Board mutinied on me and said, “We’re not going to do it that way.” They threw it out and went their own way after we had carefully worked with the environmental groups and everybody to get this done. [The outside groups] said, “We’re mad at you. We’re done with this. We’re going to sue the constitutional structure of this,” and they won in federal court doing that. That ended the Board of Agriculture. That ended me as Secretary of Agriculture.

RB: And particularly where you would have Agriculture responsible for regulating water use in the state, to have that organization operated by elected officials elected by farm organizations was kind of one of those “fox-guarding-the-henhouse” kind of arguments.

SB: You could look at it that way. That’s a valid criticism of it. The other side of it that you could look at it, it’s the caretakers of the water because most of the water in the state is used by agriculture. It’s like you’re getting buy-in by the people that you’re actually regulating by doing this. That I think can be a very successful governing model. Again, you can’t—there’s an old saying that Mike Mansfield [U.S. Senator from Montana, 1953-1977] had about “tap it lightly.” When you’re doing something, just don’t, don’t do it to a … Well, if you got too rambunctious it was going to get thrown out. If Agriculture had exerted its authority too much, it was going to get thrown out. So you just tap it lightly.

And then they do it on water quality. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t a quantity issue. It was a quality issue that came into play.

RB: Cheyenne Bottoms, you mentioned. That was an issue with stream flow into Cheyenne Bottoms, relatively old water rights there. Talk about that a little bit.

SB: That was a big issue at the time, Dave Pope putting an Intensive Groundwater Management District over Cheyenne Bottoms area. They had the senior water right within that—I think it’s the Wet Walnut [Creek] was the stream name. That was highly controversial. As you can imagine, as a good Kansan, “We’re going to save the birds instead of the crops?” My dad wouldn’t have gone along with that one too much. But you’re looking at, “Well, look, it’s the senior water right situation. You as the senior water right holder don’t want these diminish your legal standing and status for that. So long-term, the birds may win this one, but you’ve got the senior water right on most of the rest of the stuff. So, you’re going to win the rest of them. You don’t want anything to happen to that.”

I thought Dave did a masterful job in handling that because it was a senior water right holder. It is one of the major ecological features of Kansas, the Cheyenne Bottoms and Quivira.

RB: Quivira, the salt marsh wildlife refuge.

SB: Those are just two of the extraordinary environmental features, and they are extraordinary. These are the flyways over which much of the migratory birds over North America fly and stop. I’ve been out there and visited in the morning to see some of the different type of shorebirds and the like that are through there, and it’s really magnificent.

To me, it’s like the Flint Hills and the Tallgrass Prairie [National Preserve] where we’ve got most of the remaining tallgrass prairie in the continent is here. You want to preserve that. This is the jewels that you’re in charge of, and you want to do a good job with it.

RB: Dave [Pope] really worked that Cheyenne Bottoms thing. He brought people together. That Intensive Groundwater Use Areas were called IGUCAs. The water people were great at acronyms. But Dave really came up with sort of a compromise solution, you’re right, to preserve that senior water right.

The exact same fight is going on at Quivira now, only the feds hold the water right. It’s Fish and Wildlife Services as opposed to the state. It’s almost like it’s playing out in the same way, but not as constructively as it did when Dave was bringing people together at Cheyenne Bottoms.

SB: To me, Dwight Eisenhower was the Kansan of the sesquicentennial when I was Governor. We had the sesquicentennial celebration. Eisenhower is a quintessential Kansan that Dave Pope kind of mirrors at the time. Now, Dave Pope is not Dwight Eisenhower. [laughter] I love Dave, but he’s not Dwight Eisenhower. But Eisenhower’s this guy that kind of gets people to come together. He’s not the strongest general. He’s not the most commandeering. He’s not a swashbuckler, but he can bring people together. He can get them to, “OK, how are we going to make this work? And if it falls apart, I’m to blame.” He even signs a note before D-Day.

That’s a quintessential Kansas characteristic in my estimation. “It’s okay. Let’s not worry right now about who gets the glory for this. Let’s just figure out how to get it done.” And Dave would deploy those techniques. It’s something that as somebody in politics and policymaking, you’re looking at, “This is a really good craft to have in your portfolio if you can use that.” You can actually get far more done.

RB: He is an extremely patient individual who would talk and go through meetings and do all the things that allowed people to sort of buy into the process, which was important to get to the result that he got to. And the result, I think everybody would look back and say, “That’s a true success story,” people on both sides.

SB: Yes.

RB: The environmental community, the farming community. Both would say that.

SB: They’d say it’s fair. “That was fair. I didn’t quite get everything I wanted, and I was heard.” That’s a big part of it to me is you don’t just get something and go, “Okay, we’re going to do this.” It’s you get something, and you go back and say, “Well, I think we can do this.” You go back, “Well, this might work. I don’t think this is going to work.” You just keep noodling it until people are kind of either worn out or just coming on board and saying, “That’s probably fair.”

RB: Let’s go from there then to your time as Governor. One of the big issues that I remember is the Water Visioning Process. Talk a little bit about how that was a priority. Is that a function of that sense that you had when you were at Ag, you didn’t accomplish what you were hoping to accomplish when it came to water? Talk about that a little bit.

SB: It was. So, I’m coming in as Governor. I’d been in the U.S. Senate. So, I’d had this global picture, but now I’m focusing on “What can we get done in the state of Kansas?” And from my time as Agriculture Secretary, I’m really looking at the Ogallala. This is just this major resource. We’re draining it way too fast. We’ve got to do something. And how are we going to get this done?

I also knew from scar tissue previously, you just don’t kind of jump into this one. I’d seen Dave handle the IGUCA over Cheyenne Bottoms, but I’m kind of puzzled about “How do we get into this one? How do you start at it?” And Cliff Illig, who was one of the principals at Cerner, at the time was on my state economic advisory board [Council of Economic Advisors]. I was considering the Ogallala a major economic issue looking forward. We’ve got to figure this out, or you’re just not going to have much that you’re going to be able to do over western Kansas.

And Cliff said the way they’d do it is to establish the vision of where you want to be, and then you work backwards from that. You establish, “Where do you want to get to in fifty years?” and then work back from that. I was going, “OK.” We can almost all agree that in fifty years, we want the Ogallala to still be there and still be able to use it. That’s the vision.

And pretty much everybody—nobody would sit there and tell you to your face, although a lot would believe in their heart, “I want the Ogallala to be gone in fifty years.” They’d say in their heart, “I don’t see how this is going to happen,” and the governing philosophy for a lot of people, it was, “Use it or lose it” at the time. And #2, “If I don’t use it, my neighbor gets water anyway.” So, it’s going to be gone that way. And #3, “I’d just as well use as much water as I can” because it was basically a law of capture on your property, “and make as much money as I can, and then when it all goes to dryland, I’ll just use the money I made to buy more dryland,” even though it’s worth a lot less, and we have a lot less overall economic activity because you can’t have a big cattle herd out there and be shipping in all your forage. You can ship in grain, but shipping in forage gets a lot more expensive.

So, the rational economic thought was the problem that we had. It was called “the tragedy of the commons,” where really nobody is benefited by taking—nobody individually is benefited by taking care of the common issue, which is the Ogallala. Everybody is individually benefited by capturing what they can and using it now, getting more dollars in their pocket and converting it into more use of land down the road. But once you’ve got that vision established, then people are going, “OK, I agree with that vision. We should have the Ogallala still in use and usable to our kids and our grandkids and future generations in fifty years. Now, how do we get to that?”

RB: So, did you send out Tracy Streeter and the Water Office folks? They held what seemed to me innumerable meetings across the state to have maybe the kind of conversations you’re talking about that Dave Pope had when he was doing Cheyenne Bottoms. Was that your idea, to use the process that way? Was that Tracy’s idea? How did that come about?

SB: Tracy was a fellow sojourner on this. He wanted to preserve the Ogallala. He was in charge of the Water Office, and “It’s being drained. It’s under my watch.” So, he grabbed it with the zeal of a patriot, “What do we need to do?” And then used that time-honored Kansas process of just talking it to death. “Let’s just keep talking.”

Here was a major way we could have gone differently. We could have just said, “Okay, we’re cutting everybody’s water rights back a certain percentage or a certain number of inches.” Just say, “We’re draining it too fast. We’re going to take the maximum amount”—I think we had the maximum amount in some areas of twenty-four inches of water that you could use a year. “We’re going to drop that to twelve inches.” I could do it by fiat, I think. I think.

RB: I’m not so sure. Nobody knows the answer to that question.

SB: No, because that was going to be litigated quickly. It was going to make a whole lot of people mad. And it’s also not how Kansans do things. But I had a number of people coming up to me that said, “Why don’t you just cut everybody’s water appropriations six inches?” I said, “Well, first, we’ll be litigating until the cows come home. And, second, you know, there’s really not enough enforcement mechanisms to force people to do something they don’t agree with.”

It’s like a friend of mine that used to raise buffalos would say about buffalos. He said, “You can get a buffalo to do anything it wants to do.” I think that’s kind of the way it is with Kansans. You can get them to do anything they want to do.

RB: The phrase I use is, “Kansans will very seldom do anything you tell them to, but they’ll do almost anything you ask them to.” So, the upshot of that visioning process were some recommendations. Probably the biggest success of that story was it got rid of the “use it or lose it” mentality for the most part. You still hear that a little bit, but you don’t hear it like you used to. It got rid of that. Anything else come out of that process that addressed the Ogallala issue?

SB: Yes. We put tools in place so that Kansans could conserve the Ogallala. And I want to back up to your statement about how it got rid of that mentality because getting rid of the law was really relatively simple. I put forward the proposal. “Use it or lose it” was way past its prime and in many respects wasn’t that significant of a legal issue at the time.

RB: Right.

SB: So, when I propose getting rid of “use it or lose it” as Governor, it passes both houses overwhelmingly, and I sign it, and we do a big ceremony about it. But it was the mentality that you had to really get at because people had plenty of water rights. They had more water rights than they had water under them, really. So, you’re back to kind of the law of capture and the tragedy of the commons as an issue.

The other thing that was really helpful at this period of time was when you get a problem like this, and you have a resource that’s as well-known now as the Ogallala, you could bring in the best expertise from around the world, and people would come in a lot of times just gratis. They wouldn’t even charge you. And you could ask them, “What do we do?” We called on expertise from different places that were more than happy to come in and say, “Well, you’ve got to do this.”

And by that point in time, we’d done a lot of mapping of the Ogallala. At the Geological Survey and others, they knew the nature of this aquifer and how it operated. So, we got knowledge. We can get the expertise, the global best expertise that you can find. And now we’ve just got to get the mentality changed and the tools available to people.

So that’s what we start working on, really. You’ve just got to get away from this idea of “We’re just going to capture whatever water’s under here and the heck with everybody else.” How do we change that? So, you start bringing in the younger generation of people. They’re looking at the use of this Ogallala, and “If Dad keeps going the way he’s going, I’m not going to be able to use it.” And you start having them talk. It’s a theft from one generation to the next when you do it, but most Kansans again when they hear it put that way, “I’m not trying to take it from you. You’re taking it from your grandson.”

RB: It’s an intergenerational fairness issue in a lot of respects. The other thing it is is you’re already dealing with the depopulation issue in western Kansas. Declining Ogallala as a source of an economic driver is only going to exacerbate an already problematic situation.

SB: Yes. You’re going to kill it. You’re going to kill the whole place. And western Kansas is this really incredible economic engine, when you look at it, with all that freshwater resource sitting underneath it, all this amazing productive farmland, and the technology that’s best in the world to farm it. It’s the most valuable Congressional district, agriculturally in the country with all the cattle and now the dairy operations and now the wind operations sitting on it. It’s one of the biggest energy-producing districts in the country with oil and gas and now wind. So, you’ve got factors here really to work with, but you can’t use them up. Ogallala, we’ve got to get to a sustainable situation, or people are going to have to flee.

You would remember this. Were they the Poppers, I think?

RB: The Buffalo Commons.

SB: Buffalo Commons, which was just ridiculed and laughed as an East Coast idea and putting it on us. And I certainly didn’t appreciate it, but you could also see then, “Folks, if we don’t do something about this, ideas like this get more saliency.” And I think we’re getting better about just not saying no but saying, “We’re not doing that. We’re going to do it a way that works for us.” And I always said, “We’re going to do it in a way that grows our economy, sustains and grows our economy. We are not in the business of shutting it down. We’re in the business of growing it because I want more population out here, not less. We can’t do that with a shrinking economy. I’ve got to have a growing economy. How are we going to do this?”

Then you set those parameters and then people with the vision and the tools, we started putting in place LEMAs, Local Intensive Management—

RB: Local Enhanced Management Areas.

SB: Beautiful water conservation tools. A lot of this was Tracy. “How do you do this? I’ve been talking to people, and they said, ‘I’d do more if you’d let me bank my water one year and then use it the next year.’” So, we did 5-year water allocations instead of 1-year water allocations. You don’t lose any water rights if you don’t use it. You bring in the expertise to tell people, “Here’s how you can make more money off of that farm and use less water in it.”

Then you had some visionaries like Scott Foote in northwest Kansas. He has a feed yard operation. The Footes at the time were the biggest cattle owners in the state of Kansas. I don’t know how many cattle they had, but a wonderful family. I knew them well. But they were from eastern Kansas, and they could see, “If we keep using this water out here”—they had a feed yard up in northwest Kansas—“If we keep using this water like this, I’m not going to have any local corn grown.” So, he started paying his farmers to enter a LEMA, a Local Intensive Management Area, “I’ll pay you more for the corn you sell to me if it’s under a LEMA” as a way of preserving this aquifer and that shared and county LEMA got to sustainable use.

RB: That LEMA has been a success story and a model, not just in Kansas. I think people across the country have looked at that, and it was the result of a lot of conversations. Wayne Bossert from out there, in particular, I remember sort of played that Dave Pope rule of bringing people together and talking an issue to the point where they made some progress on it.

SB: They were beautiful. And again, it’s this sort of calm Eisenhower type of “We know we’ve got a tough issue here,” and I know at the end of the day if I’m a farmer, and I’ve got water rights, really what you’re after is me using less of this water. I understand that. We all understand that. But don’t kill me. Don’t do this hard right turn. Bank into it like you’d bank an airplane into something. Just take me easy where I can sustain it, and I can make a livelihood, and you’re not killing me doing it. And Wayne was wonderful about this, Tracy, and then Scott Foote putting in this incentive for growing corn under a LEMA situation where you’re using less or growing grain, grain sorghum in some cases. It got to the point where then you could show people you can do it.

I remember when the Kansas Geological Survey people came in and said to me, “You know, you’ve got something happening here that”—the aquifer was recharging a little faster than we thought it would, was. And the farmers are able to use less water and still make it productive.

RB: They’re making money.

SB: And you can actually get to a sustainable yield. And in all the years I worked on it, the Ogallala, I had never heard a technical person tell me it is even possible to get to a sustainable use. Everybody just— “The recharge is too slow. We’re using too much of it. You just can’t get there.” And he came in and he said you actually could get to a sustainable use with this, and that was all I needed. I was out, “We’re going to sell sustainable use.”

I wish we’d invented another term though. I wish we had invented “a near sustainable”—we can get to sustainable or near sustainable. By that I mean that the aquifer is still in a useable form in a hundred years or something like that. Define with “near-sustainable” means because you do have some areas where the recharge and the situation is such that I don’t know if you can do that. But you can get to a near-sustainable where in a hundred years, we’ve still got a usable aquifer.

RB: The aquifer is highly variable from place to place. That one size fits all, like that 10 or 20 percent haircut for everybody you talked about just doesn’t really work in a highly variable setting. The other thing related to your language though that’s interesting—I always told people that sustainable is a four-letter word in parts of western Kansas. You’re right. In some respects, we never came up with the language that might have helped play this thing through.

SB: In some areas. In some areas, you can get it.

RB: Right.

SB: I mean, Sheridan [County], and there’s other areas you can get to it. There are other areas, it’s just going to happen because you can’t get to enough water, and you’re shallow enough, and the Ogallala is just going to happen. That’s to me a situation—I don’t want to get to that one. That’s kind of a default. We didn’t do enough.

RB: Right.

SB: Okay, sorry.

RB: Game over.

SB: Yes, game over because we run out of water.

RB: Let’s talk about a couple of other water issues during that time. One is dredging. The John Redmond Reservoir, Tracy [Streeter] in the Water Office led an effort to really for the first time do big-time dredging on a federal reservoir. Were you involved in that process? What are your thoughts there?

SB: I was deeply involved in it. I was pitching it. This is where—most people that do what I did, being a Governor and a Senator, they’re a Governor, and then they go and be a Senator. That’s the more typical trajectory. I was Senator and then became a Governor. It’s a more usable trajectory because once you’re Senator, you know kind a little how the federal system works better, and you’ve still got some relationships there that you can use back in your state. Most Governors who became Senators were very frustrated people. They’re thinking, “I used to be in control around here, and now I can’t do anything.” I’d see a lot of really frustrated guys in the Senate that had been Governors and I’m saying, “I’d rather do this.”

Well, I knew the federal system, these are federal interior reservoirs. They’ve been built with a life expectancy of about a fifty-year, 50 percent quantity life expectancy. That’s what they were built for. People, they knew the siltation rate. They knew the situation. They said, “In fifty years, you’re going to have half as much storage capacity.”

John Redmond [Reservoir] sits right back next to our one nuclear power plant in the state. That has to have water, period, end of story. You will not limit that from having enough water, and this was the back-up for it, and then it supplies water to a dozen, fifteen communities downstream that we were having drought situations, and now your capacity—I think we were at 40 percent diminished capacity of siltation, and it’s a pretty shallow reservoir.

RB: Extremely shallow.

SB: It drains a lot of tilled areas. I’m the son of a farmer. I’ve seen all of this happen, and I also cry when I see fields that aren’t terraced right, and you’ve got big ruts down the field. I’m saying, “Don’t let that soil go down the Mississippi” or probably more realistically into the John Redmond.

So, I was going at this. I’d been a White House Fellow with the guy, he was a White House Fellow a year ahead of me, that was head of the Corps of Engineers at the time, the Army Corps of Engineers. So, I was going to him, saying, “We need to dredge this thing,” and he said, “Well, we do dredging, but it’s mostly rivers and navigation that we do it for. We’ve never done one of an Interior reservoir, but we ought to.”

So, we started working together. It became an interest project of his that was one of mine. And that was the first to my knowledge reservoir dredged interior-wise, and we gained thousands of cubic feet of water storage capacity for a nuclear power plant and a dozen downstream communities that when we hit our next drought, and we will, we’ll have water instead of having to cut back.

RB: I have one last water question that’s going to be a little bit off the wall. You and I one time were flying—I’m sure you don’t remember this, but we were flying to Dodge City for something oil-related, and we’ll get to that in a minute. As we were landing, you looked out of the airplane at the Arkansas River, and you said, not to anybody, I think maybe to yourself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was water in that river?” I’ve thought the same thing, and I’ve talked about it a lot—that lack of stream flow that you see, not just in the Ark River [(Arkansas River)], but throughout western Kansas has been pretty much an insoluble problem. You were the first person I ever heard besides me that actually raised it. I don’t know if you remember that.

SB: No, I do.

RB: What made you say that?

SB: To me, it was the vision of the Kansas we want. We want water in those streams, particularly the Ark River is a navigable stream by definition of Kansas. As a lawyer, you’re kind of going, “This is what we call legal fiction, but it’s still the law.” It’s dry. I was going, “You know, this is not impossible, and this is the Kansas we should envision. This is the Kansas we should say we want in thirty years.” Well, it’s dry right now. It is. Whether we’ve got water that comes in and a lot of the water is pretty low quality. So I actually had Tracy contact some of the major senior water holders of the alluvium water rights along the Ark River and go to them and say—start discussions with them about donating that to the state as a tax deduction or us buying some of those senior water rights to see how much further we could get the Ark River to running water because our vision should be of an Ark River with water in it continuously throughout the year.

RB: Right.

SB: We were getting a little further. It was inching a little further along, but we never got it done. In one of the State of the State messages, I said that I envisioned an Ark River that flows with water all year around.

RB: I tell people that occasionally if you get enough rain, you’ll see a stream flow in parts of it. It’s a sad thing when people are surprised to see water in a major river, but that’s where we are.

SB: That’s where we are, but we don’t have to be there. And we can change that. I believe it will happen. Again, you’re going to have to do it the Kansas way though. It isn’t going to be, “Okay, we’re going to shut off all the alluvium water right holders because we want water in the stream because it would be the typical—a basic Kansan like myself would say, “Why? Do you just like pretty water in a stream? I’m making use of this water, and we’re used to it being dry.” I said, “No, we’re doing this for future generations. We’re doing this for the preservation of the environment, and we’re doing it because we can do it, too, and preserve and enhance our economy.” We’re not going to kill the economy doing this. We’re going to do it in a way that preserves it.

RB: Let’s shift gears a little bit again and talk about energy issues during your time as Governor. The Mississippian oil and gas play is kind of the big thing. I remember you and I having a lot of conversations about. What’s your memory of that as what was going on. You’d become Governor about the time it really took off in the state. What do you remember about that?

SB: Well, fracking was just really hitting broad scale outside of Texas. They developed the technology well.

RB: For horizontal drilling with staged fracking as part of it.

SB: And they had done well in the Permian Basin. They were doing fabulously in North Dakota at the time. So, you kind of get to understand some of the oil boom and bust cycles by what we had, our little play in Kansas. We were having farmers being offered $500, $2,000 an acre for their oil lease on their land. I had farmers coming up to me, and they said, “I didn’t pay but $300 an acre for this land, and they’re going to double and triple it in some of the areas. Should I take this deal or not?”

We were holding some seminars around the state because there was an oil craze that was taking place. I was looking at this going, “Okay, now this could really yield some resources if it works,” but I’m from a Kansas farm in eastern Kansas. We’ve had our land leased for oil ten times. Zero oil wells on our land. We were paid a buck or two an acre, something like that, ten dollars an acre, maybe something like that. We weren’t ever paid that much for it, but it was just a common thing for people to kind of come through and speculate. But this one had a lot more money behind it and zest to it, oil fever with it.

So, I was real hopeful that we were going to be able to do this. But then the play really fell off quite fast. You ended up with 90 percent water or brine and 10 percent oil. Then we ended up with earthquakes. And the earthquake wasn’t the horizontal drilling or the fracking, which I support. It was the reloading of the disposal water into a place where the formation couldn’t take it.

I’m starting as Governor seeing these earthquakes in Kansas, and we don’t get earthquakes. That’s California. Well, we do now. So then, “Okay, okay. What have we got to do here?” So, we had to limit where the saltwater brine could be reloaded. And once we did that, it leveled back out. Plus, the play played out.

RB: Prices went down. A lot of things happened. You and I spent a lot of time together on the earthquake issue, and I do want to ask you about that. Before we get to that, when that play took place, it was typically called “Mississippian play.” I know that you and I talked about it a fair amount, but who within the industry did you go to? How did you go about getting a feel for what was going on with that play at the time?

SB: There were two guys I talked to the most during that. The one guy is the fellow that kind of developed the whole play, and he was a gentleman out of Wichita. I’m slipping on his name right now.

RB: Who eventually sold a lot of ground to Shell. I’m blanking on his name, too.

SB: Yes, he did.

RB: I know who you mean.

[Reviewer note: After the interview Rex provided the name, Wayne Woolsey.]

SB: He was always more cautious than everybody around him was. He was saying, “Now, if I’m right, this has got the same types of formations as what they’ve been able to successfully develop in North Dakota,” and he said, “And this could be one of the biggest oil plays in the state.” But he was in good Kansas fashion generally fairly muted, but I think all people heard was, “This could be the biggest oil play in the history of the state of the Kansas.”

RB: The next Bakken in North Dakota was what everybody sold it as.

SB: Yes. If you’ve been around oil, it gets a lot of salesmanship to it and a lot of oil fever in the brain that eats the brain. There was another oil guy out of Wichita, an old-line oil family.

RB: Scott Ritchie?

SB: No, it wasn’t the Ritchies.

RB: Dave Murfin?

SB: No, not Dave Murfin. It was another guy. [Reviewer note: After the interview Rex and Sam recalled the name, Adam Beren.] Him and his family, he’s a second generation. He’s done a lot of oil plays around Kansas, and he was just pooh-poohing it completely. They were buying up oil leases. He was used to paying $50 an acre for an oil lease, and now they were paying $500 or $2,000. “This is crazy what they are doing. This is killing us, a normal oil producer, and it’s not going to work, either.” He was one to say, “This really impacts the independent oil producer in the state of Kansas in a negative way. You’ve got all of this outside money flooding in, driving up these ridiculous prices.”

But being the son of a farmer, I was just kind of going, “This looks like payday for farmers. I’m getting this great oil lease, and they’re not going to disturb my land.”

RB: They’re never going to drill the well anyway. Why shouldn’t I take their money?

SB: The money’s out of somebody from New York who’s got oil fever.

RB: I used to refer to that as “stupid money.” You could tell when you were in trouble when the stupid money shows up. I remember some leases that folks talked about as in northwestern Kansas, a long ways from the play, the leases were more than the ground was worth.

SB: Yes.

RB: And all you could do was shake your head and think, “This can’t make sense.”

SB: This is just payday for farmers in that one.

RB: The earthquake thing—so, the earthquake showed up. I wound up dealing—and that’s both an environmental and an energy issue. It’s kind of a water issue at its heart. We wound up—you asked me to chair basically a committee to talk through solutions. In a lot of respects, our solutions where different than anybody else were using, but a lot of them were the result of that same process, which was meeting after meeting after meeting, sitting and talking to people. I remember you and I wound up at a meeting down in Anthony at a courthouse.

SB: Yes, I remember.

RB: It was right after some large earthquakes, and it was kind of going into the belly of the beast. People were upset. But that sort of consensus-building process was how we eventually got to the solution we got to.

SB: I’ve had the pleasure and the honor of serving the state of Kansas in a number of different capacities over the years. So, I’ve traveled the state, and I listened to a lot of people. I found if you’ll—a lot of people, they’re hesitant about telling you the first time you ask, they’re not really sure what you’re after. They’re not really sure what you’ll do with the information they get. They’re not really sure you even care, [thinking] that you’re just showing up for the photo op and the local [coverage] in the newspaper. So, they’re pretty skeptical.

But you come back the second time and you ask them again. [And they’re thinking,] “I don’t see any cameras around here. So, he’s a little more interested.” He might tell you a little bit. You come back the third time, fourth, fifth time. “Okay, now here’s what’s really going on here.” And they’ll tell you, and they’ll give you kind of the “wisdom of the land.” They’re the one that’s right there dealing with this, and they’re feeling it, and they’re seeing it on a daily—and it’s impacting their direct lives. They now have some sense that you actually care what their opinion is, and you don’t just think, “Look, I’m the professor out of the University of Kansas. I’m with the Geological Survey and let me tell you what you need to do.”

No. You’re out there saying, “We have a problem, and I’m not sure at all what the solution is, but we’ve got to figure something out. What can we do that would work?” But you don’t get it on the first time. You don’t get it on the second time. It’s a relational process really that they’ve got to know, “The guy’s just not out here to gig me. He doesn’t think I’m just stupid. We’ve got a problem, and if he can figure it out, and we can something in place, it’s going to solve the problem I’ve got.”

RB: Let me ask you about another energy issue that you’re maybe more identified with and that’s wind power. What’s your background there? Where did your interest in that as an energy source come from?

SB: It goes way back. My grandparents’ farm had a little wind tower on it, and they didn’t have Rural Electric at the time.

RB: To charge batteries like for radios and stuff like that?

SB: Yes. I’d ask my dad, “What’s that thing?” They didn’t have the windmill. The actual fan wasn’t on it anymore. So that was a wind tower. That was our first electricity. They would charge batteries that they have on the back porch, and that would power a couple of lights, a radio, and my grandma had even a vacuum sweeper. Dad said it didn’t have much power to it, but it would run off of that wind turbine. That was their electricity that they had.

RB: Was this in Linn County?

SB: Eastern Kansas. Linn County. “That sounds great.” I’m sure when that came in, that was a marvelous improvement in your life. You had a radio. “I’ve got lights, not just a kerosene lantern.” So, I knew the utility that wind could be. Plus, I’m – and my staff used to get on me all the time – I’m a real environmentalist. I was the most environmentalist person on my team. And I’m looking at this and going, “Guys, this is a renewable resource we can harvest, and it can do us a lot of good. Kansas is right in the alley.” Eastern Kansas isn’t, but western Kansas is. “Where we could really supply electricity for a lot of areas, and we have minimal environmental degradation.”

You’re going to have bird kill with it. You’re going to adjust some of the wind patterns that you’re going to have to account for. They’re unsightly to a lot of people. So, you’ve got impacts here, but relative to burning fossil fuels, coal, this is a substantial—this is a huge improvement. And I’m an all of the above energy person. I don’t think we tell anybody what to do on this stuff, but I think you make your options you want to go to. You try to make them as attractive as possible.

So, I was the first U.S. Senator on the Energy Committee, Republican Senator, to support wind power. The Democrats all supported it. The Republicans were all against it except me. And I’m going, “This is going to make us a lot of money. In Kansas, this is going to be a great resource for us.” I went to the utility companies in the state. They were not excited about this at all. I’m going, “This is a really good deal.”

And then [U.S. Senator] Chuck Grassley out of Iowa, another farm guy, who’s on the Finance Committee, the Tax Committee, he proposes that the 30 percent wind production tax credit, and I’m going, “That’s the Republican way of doing it. You’ve got to put up the money, but we’ll give you a nice, big tax break for it to make this thing go,” and things took off with that, that 30 percent production tax credit proposed by a Republican in a windy state, although not nearly as windy as mine made this thing fly. I just go, “I want to”—I kept looking at it, going, “This is huge.”

Then when I was elected Governor, I’m meeting with [Governor] Mark Parkinson before I go into office, and Mark’s a sharp guy. We had been friends for a long time although he switched to become a Democrat. I didn’t cotton to that very much. But he’s a sharp guy, and he’s a very sharp business guy. He said, “Wind investment in Kansas has a potential to be the greatest economic development tool in rural areas that we’ve seen in a long time” by just the companies that were lined up, wanting to come into Kansas.

And I looked at what he was saying. I looked at the numbers, the topography. I knew the wind industry from working with it federally. This could be the biggest rural investment we’ve had since the Homestead Act. This could be the largest amount of money coming into rural areas that creates jobs and opportunities and economic activity that we’ve had since the Homestead Act.

RB: One of the conversations that I had with [former Governor] Kathleen Sebelius was about the Flint Hills and basically – “moratorium” is not exactly the right word — but basically restricting wind development in the Flint Hills. It was sort of a voluntary jaw-boned agreement, maybe a kind of a Kansan approach as we are coming back to. Did that issue come back during your term?

SB: Yes.

RB: Were people wanting to go into the Flint Hills, anything there?

SB: Yes. I call that one, it was really a bluff.

RB: Right.

SB: That the utility companies willingly went along with, and that was the key piece of it. It was the Evergys. It wasn’t Evergy at the time, but the other utility companies. I believe in preserving the Flint Hills. I mentioned earlier in here, it’s one of the great ecological features we have in the state. It needs to be preserved, including the viewscape needs to be preserved. We’ve had three wind projects proposed outside of Kathleen Sebelius’s box, which I thought was an excellent move on her part, but they were still in the Flint Hills.

And so, the very first year of my administration, we proposed more than doubling the size of the moratorium area, the Flint Hills, that was including those three projects that were already sited in the Flint Hills. The Flint Hills really is a good wind energy place. If you’re just looking at producing wind energy, they want hills where it kind of directs the wind to slope up, and then you want to prop yourself up on the top of the hill, and then that catches an acceleration of the wind, that energy. And it’s also closer to power lines. Our biggest problem was we lacked—

RB: Transmission.

SB: Transmission lines. And transmission lines are a socialized cost. So, it’s everybody that uses the transmission pays for it. It’s not the big wind developer. Now he’s going to pay a toll, but it’s really paid for by the people. So, you don’t want to load this cost on the people.

So, they were ready to jump into the Flint Hills in a big way, and I had Jon Hummel, one of my staff guys, did a great job with this. I said, “Jon, we need to expand this box. You work with the people. You work with the utility companies, talk it through with them. We can produce all the electricity we need out of wind and preserve the Flint Hills. This is a doable thing. Go get it done.”

And he endlessly was talking with people. He finally got a letter of agreement really with the utility companies. We upset those three projects, but we ended up expanding—we were 14th in wind production. We ended up 4th, I think, when I had left office. We had eleven billion dollars of wind investment in the period of time I was in office. We went from 7 percent of our electricity being wind to 30 percent by the time I leave office.

We had a huge expansion of wind energy at the time. We filled our capacity of our power lines. That stalled it as much as anything. We couldn’t get the big transmission power line put in place that was going to pull western Kansas electricity up into the Chicago area because Missouri blocked it. And I worked in that, but we weren’t able to get that one through.

RB: It is striking. As you drive across the landscape of Kansas today, the big change over the last twenty, thirty-four years, almost any part of the state, except for the Flint Hills, when you drive through it, there are wind farms everywhere in this state. They’ve rearranged the landscape in a lot of respects.

SB: They have. They really belong in central and western Kansas more than in eastern Kansas. I think that the density of the population in eastern Kansas is such that for a lot more people, it’s unsightly, and they don’t get any economic benefit from it. A farmer, if he’s got a wind tower on his land, this is a great oil well. It adds an annual royalty that’s pretty substantial, and [the farmer thinks] “I’ll deal with the unsightliness for that royalty.”

RB: And the prices don’t go up and down the way oil prices do.

SB: Yes.

RB: They may rachet up because of inflation. In the time we’ve got left, a couple of questions. One is, you’ve touched on this already. When it comes to these environmental energy issues particularly, how does the time in Congress, in the Senate affect when you come back here because you deal with those issues? Is that question clear enough? You’ve touched on that background, unusual, going from there to here. How does that equip you to do this job differently?

SB: It helped me understand the federal/national systems better in which we are a piece. It helped me with relationships. I knew people that I could call. I knew the head of the American Wind [Energy] Association. I’d been in and out of New York, the money center, a lot and working with different groups there that were financing these sorts of projects.

So, you’ve got the relationships and the knowledge about how that works and about how Kansas fits into this puzzle. And we’ve got this great wind resource. How do we do that? Then I was able to meet and get to know some the guy that was proposing the long power line that was going to take –would have tripled wind energy production in Kansas and shipped it to the Chicago area.

I think that knowledge and experience and more than anything, it’s relationships. I have a guy that I heard say that life moves at the speed of relationships. So, when you’ve got some relationships there that you can then contact people, they know you’re credible. They know you’re not just trying to fleece them or do something that’s untoward, they’ll work with you.

RB: One of the things that I tell people from time to time is the worst time to develop a relationship is when you need it.

SB: Isn’t that the truth?

RB: If you’ve already got it developed and it’s in place for those times when it comes in handy in the process. This is going to be another kind of off-the-wall question, but it feels like sort of coming back to what we started with. How does growing up—your dad was a farmer. You grew up on a farm, the same way I did. How does that affect the rest of your life?

SB: Dramatically.

RB: How so? Talk about that.

SB: It frames it in many respects. My dad worked. He’d take Sunday afternoons off. Otherwise, he worked. He would take a ten-day vacation in the summer, maybe on a long one, a week, more typical. Otherwise, he worked. He was very frugal. You just didn’t spend any more than you had to because you don’t know when the next bad cycle hits. You don’t want to borrow that much money. He never borrowed any more money than he had livestock that he could sell and pay off all of his debts so that the land, the base asset, is preserved. “I’ve got a plan here if things really go wrong.”

He wasn’t really a heavily faith-oriented man. But he depended on God. If the weather, if it’s dry, we won’t have any crops. So, he’s always out there subjected to forces that are beyond his control. And it teaches you a dependency. It also, he could see the beauty of God. When the geese are flying in, they’re heading south for the winter, the beautiful Snow and Canadian Geese, he knew he could see them and appreciate the beauty of a sunset or a beautiful field of corn.

RB: You talked about growing up there in terms of your view towards soil conservation. Did that background come in handy in terms of water, how you dealt with water issues?

SB: All the time. My dad, whenever he would buy a piece of property, the first thing he did was put conservation measures on it because he knew, “If I don’t take care of the land, the land’s not going to take care of me. I am a steward of this land. This land is”—now he wouldn’t talk in these terms, but it’s good land. But if you lose it, it’s just not going to—and he had farmed farms where much of the soil had washed off, and he just really didn’t want much to do with that property.

There’s an old saying about being a dirt-poor farmer. That actually is very literal terminology. If your dirt is poor, you’re going to be a dirt-poor farmer. You’ve got to take care of the land. He really instilled that ethic in me. He believed in farming, but boy, you put the conservation practice in there. If you get a rut in that field, you go take care of it. You don’t let it get to be a bigger one.

RB: I don’t think there was anything that would make my dad madder than somebody who didn’t take care of terraces or, God forbid, if they would farm over a terrace, it would drive him crazy. [laughter] You didn’t think about staying on the farm?

SB: I wanted to. I have dreamed of being a farmer most of my life.

RB: Why didn’t you?

SB: My younger brother was there. Well, I was going to stay on the farm. I wasn’t even going to go to college. Then I got a scholarship that was a pretty good scholarship. “I guess I ought to go ahead and go to college.” I had a younger brother, three years younger, that did stay on the farm. So, when I graduated from K-State, I go to talk to my day about coming back to the farm. He said, “Nope, not room.” And that was literally the length of the conversation, in a typical Kansas farmer fashion. I was kind of saying, “Well, wait, let’s talk through this a little bit,” and it was just, “Nope, not room.”

RB: That’s a pretty common story though because as farms get bigger, there’s fewer people that can stay on the ground to do that. It’s not an option.

SB: No.

RB: But you would have done it if you could have.

SB: I tried to. I tried every angle I could. Then I go to law school, and I’m thinking, “Okay, I’ll go back near home and practice law and farm on the side.” I had a job offer in Paola, Kansas, which wasn’t too far from us. So, I could have done it. By then, I’m getting married. I’m engaged to my wife. I had a job offer in Manhattan, Kansas, and she was very committed to marrying me, but she wasn’t interested in the farm. So being a dedicated KU person, she said, “Oh, I love Manhattan. I would love to live in Manhattan,” knowing that the other option was Paola and farming that she didn’t want any affiliation with. So, we ended up in Manhattan and then here as [Agriculture] Secretary.

RB: You’re probably not the first person that’s had that experience of being talked out of a farm. [laughter] Are there any other environmental issues, energy issues that we haven’t touched about as we’ve had this conversation that I should have raised that you can think of?

SB: Solar to some degree because we’ve got good solar resource in this state. But the price of our land is worth too much for a lot of large-scale industrial solar, although you’re starting to see some of it.

RB: It’s showing up more and more, particularly in southwestern Kansas.

SB: Yes. But you also then have this ethic of just people’s love for the land. I remember we got approached about putting in solar panels on the farm that we have and offered a huge price for the land. I mean, it was triple what the land was going for at the time to put solar panels on it. And I thought, “We’re not going to do that, but I need to present this to my mom” my dad having dementia at the time, I took it to Mom. And just without even thinking, she said, “No. We’re not going to do that to the land.” And I thought, “There it is. We’re not going to do that to the land.” Just that symbiotic connection to this incredible resource.” You’re right. I agree.

RB: Interesting. Well, it’s been a good conversation. I sure appreciate you taking the time to visit. Clearly, there were a lot of environmental, energy, water issues during both your time as Secretary of Ag and as Governor that clearly you spent a lot of time on because you can still talk the language ten years later.

SB: It’s close to my heart. Being a son of a farmer like you, it’s just close to your heart, and you also when you get to be in these positions where you’re a steward of these things, then you’re more of “How do I steward this well to the benefit of the people and to the glory of God?”

RB: Well, it may also—I know when we talked with [former Governor] Mike Hayden, Mike made the point that in some respects, he has a background in biology, but he felt like he could do more for the environment in a public policy role than he could as a park ranger at a state park. In some respects, that position allows you to do those things on a bigger scale than you would do on a smaller scale, too.

SB: That’s true.

RB: Well, thank you for having the conversation. I appreciate it.

SB: My pleasure. It was fun.

[End of File]

Interviewee Date of Birth

September 12, 1956

Interviewee Political Party

Republican

Interviewee Positions

Secretary of Agriculture, State of Kansas 1986-1993
U.S. House Member, Second District, Kansas 1995-1996
U.S. Senator, Kansas 1996-2011
Governor, State of Kansas 2011-2018
Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, United States 2018-2021

Interview Location

Statehouse, Topeka, KS

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Interview of Sam Brownback, December 2, 2024

Interviewed by Rex Buchanan