Vernon
We don't have any money for doing that. I'd say, "Well, you can't play both games.
You've got to do it one way or the other.
So a lot of times we had trouble getting the
studies done that we needed done because of that game, it went back and forth all the time.
Q ..
Well, wasn't one of the things that Gianelli, Dawson, and Page all came down on was that
these survey reports were not done well enough to really make a decision on some of these
projects?
A
Well, a lot of them are like that, yes. There were a lot of them that remained in Gianelli's
office for a long time. I remember
reporting to our staff meetings how many survey
reports he had gotten in that particular period and how many were stacked up over at the
Secretary's office, none of them going forward. Just sitting over there.
It always used to seem to me--here I'm concerned about the quality of those reports and
he's concerned about getting them in to the Secretary's offices who are just going to stack
them up in the comer some place--why not use that time to improve on the quality of those
reports. So we never did see eye to eye on that because he didn't get any credit for a
report that was out there being massaged and improved. He got credit when it came into
the office.
But what you're saying is quite right. They were concerned about it. They weren't
getting all the information they needed to make decisions, but I think a lot of it was just
that the Administration didn't want the reports. They didn't want them sent forward
because that meant that Congress might start appropriating some money for projects that
the Administration didn't want to spend.
Review of Work
Q ..
Well, how did you find the Assistant Secretary's office as far as the quality of their review
of your kind of work?
Well, they really didn't have anybody over there that could review our work. I don't
A
think I ever remember anybody over there that knew much about hydrology and hydraulics
except Jack Ford. Their work was more in the planning area, in a general overall picture.
They had the economists over there, too. Of course, Ed Dickey? his primary expertise is
economics. But most of the others that were over there had backgrounds in planning or
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