Water Resources People and Issues
You must have been aware of the rivalry between those two organizations, that
is, you know, the Corps at one time was hoping, and made its hopes known,
that it would operate and maintain the seaway once the construction was
finished, and evidently, according to what I've read, there was not a heck of
a lot of love lost between a person like Sturgis, for instance, and the head of
the Saint Lawrence Seaway Corporation at that time.
Can you shed any light on that?
Yes, but first let me say that even though this was the Eisenhower
administration, I don't think it was so much Eisenhower that originated policy
as the business interests that controlled the Republican Party. To me,
Eisenhower was what I would call a warmed-over Democrat. I don't know
whether he was a Republican or Democrat until they offered him a nomination
from the Republican side. But he was what the Republican Party needed after
20 years of the Democratic Party's hold on the presidency. He was electable,
which Taft may not have been in 1952.
So the partnership philosophy of getting projects and programs financed by
nonfederal money was developed as a means of reducing the size of the federal
government. The seaway was one of the partnership projects-the power phases
of it were done by the New York State Power Authority and the Saint
Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation was created as an independent
government corporation to handle the navigation project. You remember, the
Saint Lawrence Seaway has been discussed back as far as the Harding or the
Coolidge or the Hoover administrations and maybe for a lot longer than that.
I think the Bureau of the Budget had the feeling that they could get a better
partnership arrangement there if we had a government corporation to do the
navigation with the New York State Power Authority doing the power.
Up until that time, when the Corps built projects like John Day, which was in
the mill then, and The Dalles project, the Corps did the power and the
navigation and there hadn't been any thought of separating responsibility for
the two functions. But then the Eisenhower administration decided that the next
dam on the Columbia should be a partnership, and so Priest Rapids was to be
done that way. We called it a partnership, but really the project was turned
over to the public utility district. But I don't think there are any navigation
locks.
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