Water Resources People and Issues
domination. This came up in the Hells Canyon fight but largely as a public
relations campaign funded by the Idaho Power Company and probably by the
whole private power industry which, I think, united on that. They got the
EBASCO services to come down and testify against that project.
And so all of that is underlying the surface here, and that is probably one of the
reasons that the magnitude of the Corps' and Bureau's programs has declined
as a percentage of the federal budget. I think most people in the West have
looked on the Bureau as helping them and people in the East who have
benefitted from Corps' projects look on it as helping them, rather than being
government run amuck.
What people are complaining about are expenditures on government programs
that don't help them. This is why people think the government is too big. They
don't object to Social Security or Medicare or any of the programs that help
them. They're always objecting to what somebody else gets.
But there are some great abuses of the programs, for example, when the Corps
of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation tangled in the Pine Flat case. The
Bureau thinks it got authorization through its finding of feasibility on Pine Flat
as a reclamation project, under which local people would have to pay their
share of the costs. Some of it would be paid by power revenues, of course.
And then the Corps took the position that Pine Flat is a flood control project
and got authorization from the Congress to build it as a flood control project.
This kind of a struggle tended to repel a lot of people and make them feel that
this is just two bureaucracies fighting and that all of these projects are just pork
barrel stuff.
Arthur Maass (Muddy Waters)
Well, Arthur Maass in his book,
makes a great deal of the Pine
Flat case, showing not only a certain arrogance on the part of the Corps of
Engineers, but also, of course, the clout that the Corps has within Congress,
suggesting that Congress, through the Corps, can more or less have its own
way when it comes to water projects. If people don't like what the Bureau of
Reclamation is doing, they can go to the Corps-and I suppose vice versa. But
in this particular case, it would be cheaper for local interests if the Corps were
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