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Floor Speech

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Mr. HICKENLOOPER. Mr. President, I rise today to honor my great friend John Stulp. John passed away this past Monday, July 7. He was with his family in Lamar, out on the Eastern Plains, a place that he loved more than anything.

John was a good man--a great man, by any measure. Certainly, he was defined by his unwavering commitment to his family, his neighbors, his friends, and his home State of Colorado. He was the essence of a public servant.

His list of contributions to our State is impressively long. He served as Colorado's commissioner of agriculture during my predecessor Bill Ritter's governorship, and I appreciate Governor Ritter introducing me to him, discovering him for me.

John Stulp was a former Prowers County commissioner, a Democratic commissioner in a county that is not well-known for Democratic commissioners.

He was also a former State board of land commissioner, a State wildlife commissioner, and a member of the State board of agriculture.

And in John's mind, above all that, he was a dryland wheat farmer and a cow-calf rancher from southeast Colorado.

John's reputation for patient consensus-building is well-known throughout our State and trusted throughout our State.

In 2011, I was the newly elected Governor, and Colorado had already experienced a couple of years of drought. The years 2011 and 2012 were bad years for drought, and I was convinced that we needed a blueprint, a plan of some sort, to address the gap between the State's projected growth and its future water supply to make sure that we had the supply that could match our needs.

I recruited John to serve as my top water policy adviser. We made it a cabinet-level position. He came to all our cabinet meetings. He was our water czar. It was clear to me that we would be hard-pressed to find anyone that could do the work he did. John understood the agricultural community in Colorado better than almost anyone.

Maybe that is why, when I first approached him with the idea of a statewide water plan, he wasn't immediately convinced. Actually, he was far from it; he was, I would say, more than skeptical. He knew how hard it would be to map Colorado's water supply, to chart a plan to conserve water that we might need in the next 50 years, and to get everybody at the table. In Colorado, we talk about how whiskey is for drinking but water is for fighting. He didn't think it was a smart idea for me politically, as a new Governor, to take on an issue that had the potential to be so divisive, but he understood that we couldn't let our rivers and farms be at risk of running dry and that we needed him, Colorado needed him.

He set aside his reservations and he rolled up his sleeves and he went to work--he and James Eckholt and a lot of other people. It was remarkable to watch them. He crisscrossed the State hosting roundtables, talking with farmers, listening to stakeholders--really hearing them--trying to resolve the issues and trying to align their self-interests.

John poured his heart and soul into that plan, and in the end, John accomplished what I think even he previously believed would not be possible. We finalized the State's first-ever water plan in November of 2015. It certainly would never have happened without his prodigious efforts. He created a framework that will evolve as our State's climate and demographics continue to evolve.

More importantly, in the process, he created an ecosystem, a network, of relationships across geographic and political boundaries. And that was one of his many great legacies--his many legacies--that he leaves to Colorado. Certainly, his family is his greatest legacy, but he did a lot for the ability of Colorado's future and water.

When you travel a lot with someone, you spend a lot of miles with them and you stay at their home, you share their food, you meet their neighbors, you get a real sense of their goodness. I am not sure there are gradations of goodness. But I have traveled long distances with John Stulp. I stayed at his home in Prowers County, where he and his remarkable wife Jane would cook up a barbecue and get me together with some of their neighbors. He even loaned my son Teddy a .410 shotgun so he could learn how to shoot.

If I did believe in gradations of goodness, John and Jane Stulp would be at the very top. Even with all the great contributions he made to our State, I think John's goodness, the pureness and the deepness of his heart, is what I will miss the most.

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