Vernon K.
A ..
Actually, it was primarily a political thing. We tried different criteria, and Jack would go
over to OMB and talk to them about it and say, "Well, if we use this criteria, here is about
the way it will be. That we'll end up with saying anything bigger than, smaller than one
square mile, why the government will never get involved with it. Or two square miles or
something.
How many projects will that eliminate, how many projects would that keep the government
out of, probably looked back over the ones that the Corps had worked on and stuff like
that. They looked back and said, "Well, we would have eliminated all these projects here
if we would have applied this criteria. OMB would say, "Well, that's good. Let's use
that because we want to eliminate those kinds of projects.
They decided themselves (OMB) what was a reasonable, but they didn't want to come
right out and say that. They didn't want to come out and say exact size of area or
something like that because that would have been too arbitrary. They wanted to come up
with some sort of a technical way of doing it. You're doing the same thing, it's just that
you come up with some combination of probability of run-off and various things for
different sizes. It makes it look more scientific, but hell, it's not really any more scientific
than just doing it arbitrarily.
Q ..
So you were fitting some criteria to a political decision.
A ..
Right.
Q ..
What they felt was comfortable.
A
Made them feel better. It's the same way with dam safety. Gianelli was trying to find
ways to turn down doing dam safety. He was looking at risk analysis as his savior so he
would not need to spend any money on dam safety. He even promoted some conferences
and stuff to get people to come up with ways to analyze projects so that he wouldn't have
to--so they would still look good.
He didn't want to do, just like we were talking, make a political decision, "I'm not going
to spend any money on that project. Just say, "Well, we're analyzing it and we'll keep
analyzing it until we can come up with a way that says we don't need to fix it.
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