Water Resources People and Issues
them. And the Corps came in to Congress and got a resolution to authorize a
survey report on Chief Joseph. When you really look at Chief Joseph, you
wonder why would the Corps be building Chief Joseph? There is no flood
control or navigation benefit. It is a run-of-the-river power plant that serves
almost as an after-bay for the Grand Coulee power plant, and the two plants
have got to be operated together. It is a much different type of project than
Bonneville, which the Corps built first, and that's hundreds of miles away and
is required for navigation.
In 1946 the Corps came in with a report proposing to build Chief Joseph Dam.
The Bureau saw that the Corps was picking off a prime power site, the
bay for Grand Coulee. The Bureau wanted to use that site, wanted to pump out
of it for some irrigation projects using the power from Chief Joseph, just it was
using the power from Grand Coulee to pump up to the Columbia River plateau
for the Columbia Basin project.
So the Bureau saw that the Corps was barging in here with Chief Joseph. So
we had a major fight.
Of course, the Corps had its report ready first. The Bureau hadn't even
investigated Chief Joseph. There was never any question of that. But the
argument we developed for our spokesman at the hearings on the project,
Warner Gardner, the solicitor of the department, was, "We're not playing a
game of football, gentlemen, so that the one who gets the ball first runs with
it. This is a serious decision that should be based on all of the facts," and he
explained all these reasons why this should be a Bureau project and you
shouldn't have another agency building the after-bay for a major power project.
And we drew up a big colored map showing the Chief Joseph Dam in red in
the middle of the Bureau's projects.
The position the Bureau was taking was that this was an invasion into the
federal reclamation program. At that time, there was no way you could use
revenues from a Corps' project to subsidize a Bureau's project. There wasn't
any basin account at that time.
That was the initial postwar fight continuing the struggle over projects that
erupted over the Pine Flat Dam before the war. The Bureau lost again. It was
in the `46 act, I think, that Chief Joseph was authorized.
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