Water Resources People and Issues
So the Bureau of Reclamation always called this the Valley Gravity project, and
the law implementing the treaty required that the Bureau of Reclamation fund
this project and obtain a repayment contract. At an early stage in my tenure at
the Bureau of Reclamation, we had this big meeting with the Department of
State and the International Boundary and Water Commission and people from
Texas and others, and it was more or less demanded by the Bureau of the
Budget that the Bureau of Reclamation should be getting a project together to
implement this law and get some reimbursement for that dam.
And so we sat around with all these State Department types and all the
highfalutin assistant secretaries, and I was there for the Coordination of Plans
Section supporting Jack Dixon. After we talked and talked all day and didn't
get anywhere, Jack Dixon turned to me and he said, "Ted, will you write up
the memo on this about what we concluded?" (Laughter)
A: I went back and I guess I wrote up what we should have concluded, and it
seemed to work, because I seemed to be put in that role an awful lot. We had
those meetings every year on the Valley Gravity project. We kept on and on
and on arguing about it, but we never did get any reimbursement because the
Bureau didn't build the gravity canal. The International Boundary and Water
Commission built the dam and they eventually called it Falcon. It was a
somewhat different project. But the whole idea of our meetings was to see that
the U.S. would get its share of the water before the Mexicans took it.
During this time, you had this controversy, usually called the
upstream/downstream controversy, and in my own mind, I think of it mostly
in terms of a controversy between the Soil Conservation Service
and the
Corps of Engineers, particularly as it relates to the Arkansas River, but it
sounds like the SCS might have as much to say about Bureau of Reclamation
A: Oh, yes-
-as about the Corps projects.
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