Engineer Memoirs
The Carter administration wanted to have publicity about this whole process. So we
said, "Very well." At each stage we would have public announcements, releases of what
we were doing.
There were a couple of hundred projects that had to be reviewed, because we were
supposed to review all of the active projects. All the active projects of the Bureau of
Reclamation were going to be reviewed by them.
We had a screening criterion to begin with, which addressed the economic feasibility
and the environmental acceptability and safety. We were going to screen all the projects
against these criteria. After that was through, we would have selected some number for
further study. From that we would have a more detailed analysis of each of these. And
then from that we would pick a final group that would be the ones that would be
candidates for being stopped or changed.
We laid all this out. Everybody agreed--the Office of Management and Budget and the
White House people that were involved. Kathy Fletcher was one of the people in the
White House.
After the first go-through, we had 51 projects that had some question about them. It
was time to announce this list of 51. In the meantime, there had been a din up in
Congress protesting the whole proposition. The Congress had passed laws, the
President had signed them, and they had been enacted to build these things. A President
didn't just set aside the law of the land--a concept that Carter really didn't appreciate,
in my opinion.
So we got the list of 51 projects ready, and I had it. We had been working 7 days a
week, 12 hours a day, to do this work. The people in the Office of Management and
Budget and the White House staff didn't really care whether there was an orderly
review or not. They just were interested in a political demonstration.
They hadn't been very supportive. So I went over to the White House with this list,
ostensibly to talk to the people there about the fact that we weren't really getting the
kind of close coordination that allowed us to move ahead on this fairly rapid schedule.
The whole review was supposed to take less than 60 days to get all this work done. But
we had all this disruption.
I was ushered into the office of then-Vice President [Walter M.] Mondale. Ham Jordan
was there, and Jody Powell. The associate director for natural resources was there from
the Office of Management and Budget, not Bert Lance or McIntyre. But the next man
down. Mondale heard my complaint, but then the subject shifted to this list. Mondale
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