Water Resources People and issues
the admiral who was in charge of the Coast Guard. He felt that the Saint
Lawrence Seaway was trying to usurp the control of navigation there, and he
said,
if you let them put up these navigation markers in the seaway,
they're going to want to move on up into the Great Lakes which are
international waters. And he went on to say, "We'll have two systems of
navigation in this country.
The Coast Guard, of course, puts up the buoys and the markers in all of the
harbors that the Corps of Engineers improves, and I really got a kick out of
that bureaucratic fight because it was such a small amount, amounting to maybe
a million dollars. But the Coast Guard saw it as a real threat to its authority
over the navigable waters of the United States.
McClellan-Kerr Waterway
Interesting. Let me turn our attention to another issue, and this is going to
introduce one of the most interesting personalities of the era, Senator Bob Kerr
of Oklahoma. The issue that I wanted to first mention, though, or get your
response to, was the development of what came to be called the
McClellan-Kerr Waterway in Arkansas. Let me, just by way of getting your
comments, mention to you an observation that's been made to me, and I've
never been able to really document it, and that is that I guess it was in 1956
when the Interstate Highway Act was being considered, that the agreement was
made that Senator Kerr would support the Interstate Highway Act in return for
some support from some highway supporters for the construction of what came
to be called the McClellan-Kerr Waterway.
Do you know anything about that? Could you give us some background?
A: No, I was not aware of anything like that, but I'm not surprised. I don't
remember in which act the Arkansas River Waterway was authorized. Do you
remember which year that was authorized?
I think that goes back to the late
actually.
A: Yes, it was an authorized project when I was in the Bureau of the Budget.
`48, something like that.
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