Vernon
constituents upstream and constituents downstream and they were telling both of them they
were going to take care -of them. That was impossible to do. They really get angry at you
because you tell them you couldn't do it.
Q ..
Politicians are not necessarily good about understanding some of these things, are they?
A ..
They understood them, they just didn't want to. They wanted to be able to tell their
constituents, "We've taken care of your problem," and it's not always possible.
Q ..
In this particular kind of thing, where you would set out to adjudicate interests basically,
what was the balance between rural and urban? Were there any significant conflicts in
many of these areas between rural and urban interests, say irrigation versus flood control?
A
Well, you can think of a lot of
where rural people benefitted from storage that
they didn't pay for. Just to give you an example, there was one small reservoir project
in North Dakota that during drought years--it was a flood control project but it had some
recreation storage in it--but during drought years they didn't have enough water
downstream to water their cattle for some drought years. They had no rights to release
water from there--there was no legal claim on the water in the reservoir.
The Corps or the Bureau of Reclamation, or one of the federal agencies like the Corps,
would allow some release to go downstream to take care of those domestic needs, not [for]
irrigation particularly but just to take care of domestic needs and to keep some fish in the
stream and things like that, even though there haven't been any when the project was
originally authorized. Nobody, of course, ever really complained about it. But they were
getting benefits that they didn't pay for.
If they really wanted those benefits, why they should have been paying something for it.
But they weren't willing to pay for the storage to put in the reservoir, but they were
willing to collect the benefits from it. So there are a lot of people that want the projects
to do things for them, but they don't want to pay for any of it.
I guess the biggest hassle when it comes to irrigation vs. flood control is the fact that you
have to get somebody to pay for the irrigation. When it comes to flood control, if it's
considered widespread benefits and therefore, unless it's for a particular individual or
something like that, why the federal government generally takes over most of the cost, or
it used to anyway. Things have changed somewhat. At least they took over the majority
of the cost.
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