Colorado Policy Talks: How Two Korbel Grads Are Shaping Water Policy

Water touches nearly every part of daily life, from agriculture and housing to public health and, increasingly, national security. That interconnectedness is what drew two Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs alumni to careers in water policy.

Michael Thomas (Master of Public Policy '11), Senior Water Efficiency Planner at Northern Water, helps municipalities across Northern Colorado use water more efficiently. Kimberly Lemme (MA International Economic Development '04) has spent more than two decades expanding access to water and sanitation, first internationally and now across the United States.

Their paths to water policy began in very different places, but both say the interdisciplinary education they received at Korbel prepared them for a field where progress depends as much on relationships and governance as on technical solutions.

Different Paths, Shared Foundation

Michael grew up in Colorado Springs and experienced the impacts of the 2002 drought firsthand. After studying global freshwater conflict as an undergraduate in Switzerland, he came to Korbel to understand those challenges closer to home.

"All of the work that I do is in pursuit of saving water. Since we pull from the West Slope, we have a responsibility to use our water as efficiently as possible," he said.

After spending six months at a hospital in Kenya during the height of the HIV crisis, Kimberly arrived at Korbel expecting to pursue global health. Instead, she gravitated toward global finance and economic development, work that led her to 15 years at Water For People, expanding water and sanitation access worldwide, and more recently to DigDeep, focused on water access along the Texas-Mexico border, on tribal lands, and in Appalachia.

Michael found a similar cross-disciplinary pull in Korbel's small class sizes, where students focused on water still had to reckon with healthcare policy, budgeting, and national security debates happening around them. Kimberly experienced the same mix from the other side, sitting alongside classmates headed into intelligence work and global health.

"Here we are in 2026, and we have municipal water systems being targeted by foreign governments. It's all interconnected," she said.

Water Is a Governance Challenge, Too

Their interdisciplinary lenses now shape both alumni's work and pertain to the broader issue of water access and conservation in Colorado today.

At Northern Water, Michael is working to develop a regional rebate portal for water-efficient devices and supports water-loss auditing, helping utilities find leakage in aging infrastructure before investing in repairs. In Colorado, cities set their own rules for things like lawn-watering restrictions and conservation programs, which makes regional collaboration essential.

"Colorado is the only state where all the water moves out. We are the headwaters for seven different basins," Michael said. "So we have to collaborate. We have to work together to make sure the state has a stable water future."

Michael also helps coordinate that collaboration directly. Through the Colorado Drought Coordination Group, he meets regularly with water resource managers and conservation staff from across the state to compare notes on what messaging and restrictions are working and where they aren't. Because of how our water system (the Colorado-Big Thompson Project) operates, Northern Colorado's water providers have had more options and faced fewer restrictions than the West Slope, a gap Michael says he's mindful of as drought conditions persist.

In his experience, progress rarely comes from certainty. "It's in discussions and in disagreements that better policy comes about," he said.

Kimberly has seen a similar governance dynamic from a different angle. Millions of Americans still lack reliable access to clean water and sanitation at home, and she's found that the barriers are strikingly consistent across the communities she's worked with: political will, historic underinvestment, and entrenched inequity. In the U.S., she says, the strongest predictor of whether a household has water access is race, closely followed by income, a pattern she traces back to redlining and to tribal lands where infrastructure investment stalled once utilities hit "good enough" coverage.

"Good infrastructure only works when it's backed by political will, sound governance, and financial support," she said.
These governance challenges extend to the Colorado River itself, where negotiations over how the state's namesake river is shared among Western states remain unresolved. The stakes feel more urgent this year amid one of the driest summers on record.

"We all have very quick memories. We get a few days of rain here in Denver, and we forget," Kimberly said.
Still, she sees progress in who's now at the table: unlike in 1922, when the original interstate agreement was signed, tribal nations have some representation, and that feels like progress to her.

Reasons for Optimism

Despite the scale of the challenges, both alumni point to real progress and the idea that solving these complex problems requires smarter choices, not sacrifice.

Michael has watched Colorado grow more comfortable adopting the kind of water-efficiency codes that states like Oregon and California put in place a decade ago. The results are showing up in the numbers: average indoor residential water use across his region has held roughly flat even as the population has grown by hundreds of thousands of people. He's also seen a shift toward native, low-water landscaping, something Northern Water demonstrates on its own campus.

"We don't have to sacrifice our way of life to use water efficiently," he said. "It does require some choices, but it doesn't have to be dire."

Kimberly's current work has taken her from Colorado to Hawaii, where she's consulting on wastewater and cesspool issues that mirror what she's seen everywhere from Malawi to the Navajo Nation to Cape Cod: the systems people rely on most are the ones they notice least, until they fail. Now she focuses on helping organizations tell that story clearly enough to move funders and policymakers to act.

A Shared Outlook for an Uncertain Future

Michael and Kimberly entered Korbel from different places and have taken very different paths through the water sector. What connects their stories isn't a particular job or specialization, but how they approach complex problems: moving between disciplines, weighing competing priorities, and building relationships across communities and institutions.

In the wake of complexity, trust in relationships over quick fixes drives Michael and Kimberly’s ability to navigate a water landscape shaped by scarcity, aging infrastructure, and increasingly complex questions of governance and security. As Colorado and the broader West confront an uncertain water future, connecting the dots and bringing people together is proving to be one of the most important tools of all.

CO Policy Talks is an ongoing series spotlighting Korbel alumni working across the policy landscape. Stay tuned for more conversations.