Theodore M.
Bureau of the Budget hired me not to work on the Bureau of Reclamation
budget, but to work as an examiner on the Corps' program. And we had
Charlie Warner and Floyd Peterson, both of whom had had that experience in
Corps offices.
But we didn't leave it at that. Every year, every member of the staff went out
to the field for three or four weeks to look at the projects and become familiar
with the program. That was the plan, that we had staff that really knew
those programs. I went up and down the Missouri River one year and even
crawled up into the scroll cases of the turbines that were under construction at
the Garrison Dam. I don't know why, but that was my nature, to see what it
was like in there before the water came in.
And I went up and down the Mississippi. I remember seeing some places along
the Mississippi levees that seemed just like the old plantation days-Moon Bend
on the Mississippi River within a few miles of Memphis, for example. We
drove the levees maybe for miles or so south of Memphis.
So the budget examiners really knew the programs very well. At that time, Joe
Tofani was the budget officer for the Corps, and we had a very good
length relationship. Incidentally, Joe had come to the Corps from the Bureau
of Reclamation and so we had a lot in common. I had known Joe off and on
since the middle Rio Grande fight when we first met, which would have been
1946 or `47, before the `48 act, anyway.
So we had a lot of respect for each other and we worked well together and the
Corps was very responsive because they knew that they couldn't put anything
over on us. At that time, I wasn't working on the Bureau of Reclamation
program at all, but the Bureau was always fighting us. The Bureau had been
fighting all the time because the Bureau of the Budget wanted to eliminate the
use of secondary benefits for project justification. They would write really
nasty letters back to the Department of the Interior, trying to stop projects like
Central Arizona and the Santa Barbara project in California. The Bureau of the
Budget, as I recall, rarely ever approved Bureau of Reclamation projects.
Q: You're talking about the Santa Barbara dredging project.
A: No, the Santa Barbara County project. There were two or three aspects of the
Santa Barbara County project-the Cachuma Dam and a tunnel through the
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