Water Resources People and issues
I can remember working one Saturday to make a big map showing all the
Bureau's projects in nice shades of blue and yellow and green, and the Lucky
Peak project in red right in the middle. The Bureau was trying to take Lucky
Peak away from the Corps, but it didn't work.
On Hells Canyon, the particular thing that the Bureau wanted was the revenues,
the power revenues, to subsidize irrigation. In the upper Snake
basin-everybody agreed that, in spite of Lucky Peak, it was primarily
reclamation territory. In the lower basin, the lower Snake dams and McNary
and John Day was navigation territory-the Bureau never had any problem with
McNary and John Day and The Dalles. Of course, Bonneville was in there
first, and Priest Rapids was built by somebody else.
Yeah, by private.
No, it was built by a public utility district, but Rocky Reach was private.
Right.
A: So Hells Canyon could have logically gone either way. It was in between. But
what the fight was all about was who's going to get to build these dams as a
matter of bureaucratic aggrandizement, but also it was the power revenues that
the Bureau wanted. And then also, this was not the Bureau so much as it was
the department under Secretary [Julius]
and under Secretary Oscar
Chapman. The driving force was Assistant Secretary Jebbie C. Davidson,
Gerard Davidson, who wanted to extend the Bonneville Power rate into Idaho,
and Hells Canyon was the key instrument to do that. Power from a big
generating plant like Hells Canyon would have to move both ways. Idaho is
closest.
You're going to move a lot of power into Idaho, but some would go the other
way, to the lower basin, and this would provide transmission lines that would
provide a way to extend the Bonneville power rate which, if you remember,
was 2 mills per kilowatt hour for firm power. Jebbie Davidson wanted to
extend that rate up through Idaho which would have carried the benefits of
public power all up through the Idaho Power Company territory.
In other words, this was the same thing that came up in our discussions of the
history of the Flood Control Act down in New Orleans. Certain people were
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