Q ..
What about Augie Smet?
Oh, Augie and I went to Graduate School at Catholic University together. Went to school
A
there at night for about five years to get a master's degree, and Augie and I had several
classes together. But Augie was, he was a really hard working programmer. Well, let's
see, I'm trying to remember, Bory worked for him. Augie was in charge of programming.
He was always a hard worker. He spent a lot of time with OMB, of course, as most of
his work was with the OMB staffer in setting up the funding for years and arguing with
those staffers as to how much monev thev could get for the various things and trying to
educate them on how to do things and why they needed the money and all that sort of
thing.
Things can get really confused over in OMB. I remember one time there was a budget for
water quality. Water quality was new and, well, especially the Executive Branch of the
government didn't want to spend a lot of money on water quality at the time. But we had
a big budget for water control management, big budget, you know, because there was all
this satellite stuff and gauges all over the country and a lot of people working in it.
So we had a staffer over in OMB who was looking over our budget, and he didn't know
the difference between water quality and water control. He thought water control was part
of water quality. Well, they're somewhat related. What you do in water control has
something to do with water quality. But water quality is a sub-part of water control, not
the other way around.
But, anyway, he thought it was all water quality. He cut the budget by 80 percent or
something like that. Just really wiped it out. After they sent in the budget, why he "X'd"
that out and put down about 20 percent of what they had asked for. We had a hell of a
time with him trying to explain to him what the difference was and why all these things
were necessary.
We took him out to the field offices and showed him around to two or three of the water
control centers and explained to him exactly what each person did and how water quality
was just a small part of the overall--so you could cut out all of the water quality money
and you wouldn't have much of an impact on the water control budget. But when you
start cutting out the water control budget, you don't have anybody left that knows how to
operate the reservoirs.
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