Hamlet J. "Chips" Barry III

Hamlet J. BarryManager

Denver Water Department


Chips Barry has been involved in natural resources and water issues since 1969, as either a practicing attorney or as a state or city official. Prior to becoming Manager of the Denver Water Department, he was in Governor Romer’s cabinet as Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. That department concerns itself with water, mining, parks, wildlife, geology, and oil and gas. He began his tenure as Manager of the Water Department in January 1991.

A Denver native, Barry attended the Denver public schools and graduated from George Washington High School in 1962. He graduated cum laude from Yale College in 1966 and obtained a law degree from Columbia University Law School in 1969. After law school, he was in succession, a Vista volunteer in rural Alaska, a law clerk to Judge Robert McWilliams on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver and a legal services lawyer in Micronesia. He returned to Colorado from the Marshall Islands in 1975, resuming a career in western water and natural resources matters.

In the last 20 years, Chips Barry has made more than a hundred public presentations on western water policy, water development, public land management, mining, and the interaction of state, local and federal government in western resource issues.

Barry has been involved in community and public activities since his return to the Denver area in 1975. He has been a grader for the Colorado Bar examination, and a member of the Board of Governors for the Colorado Bar Association. He was a member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Colorado Mined Land Reclamation Board, and the Energy Impact Advisory Board. He presently serves on the Colorado River Advisory Committee, and was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Colorado Chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He was recipient of the 1993 Thorne Ecological Institute Award for Environment Achievement.

Chips Barry enjoys tennis, squash, skiing and golf. He is a collector of old Saabs, foreign paper money, and books about Micronesia and Alaska.

He is married to the former Gail Nelson, a landscape architect in Denver. He has two sons, Pennan, a Medical Epidemiologist at San Francisco Department of Public Health, and Duncan, a Lecturer at University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering.