Water Resources People and issues
River Basin Commissions
Well, there are a couple of things happening here. I suppose they complement
one another, but on one level, they seem to be a little bit contradictory, too,
and that is this: you have the Hoover Commission, the first Hoover
Commission, and also President Truman's Water Policy Commission coming
out in favor of a consolidated Water Resources Department within the federal
structure.
On the other hand, those same commissions are arguing for the establishment
of river basin commissions around the country. Of course, this goes back to
some of President Roosevelt's ideas for a Missouri Valley Authority which
never did get off the ground as Roosevelt conceived it.
That seems to be a step towards obtaining, or giving to the states, perhaps, a
bit more say so in what's happening to regional water development-nonfederal
interests, in any case. How do you interpret this interest in river basin
commissions at this particular time, which, of course, leads finally into
something else.
A: Where this got started, think, was either the National Conservation
Commission in
or the National Waterways Commission about that same
time in the Teddy Roosevelt era. He supported the idea that we should develop
every river and use every drop of water profitably, all the way from the
headwaters to the sea. There was almost a kind of a cult for river basin
development-it wasn't a cult, really, in that sense, but a lot of people felt that
that was the ultimate objective, and then they immediately started running into
state lines and agency jurisdictions that made it impossible to do this, and that
started people thinking in terms of organizations based on river basins.
The real problem, as I see it, was the need to coordinate the agencies working
in the river basin. We've tried to coordinate the federal agencies as far back as
1910. I think the Inland Waterways Commission was set up really in the hopes
that it would coordinate the agencies. They reported about 1912, or whenever
it was. But instead of doing the job, they made another report which called for
coordination. Then the
Commission was authorized in the 1917 act
but was never established. I think one of the reasons it was never set up was
that the Corps saw a potential threat in it. Maybe the Corps and the Bureau
both saw a threat in it. Instead, we got the Federal Power Commission
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