Water Resources People and Issues
Rivers and Harbors and Flood Control Act of
Now, at about that same time, there was another really major issue that came
up to me and that was the omnibus bill that eventually became the Rivers and
Harbors and Flood Control Act of 19%. There hadn't been a rivers and
harbors bill for a few years, and the traditional two-year cycle had been
broken, but in 1957 the Congress passed a bill, and because it was the first bill
for several years, they put a lot of projects in it on which they didn't have
completed reports. They also had a number of projects in the lower Mississippi
valley which they were going to add to the
project, which meant that
the federal government would pay all the operation and maintenance costs.
And these projects-I think it was Boeuf and
bayous, probably in
Louisiana or Arkansas, and several other projects really were land reclamation
projects. We were still operating under the provisions of A-47, or, you might
say, trying to operate under these provisions, even though there was little
political support for them. So the staff still would object if an agency didn't
follow those provisions which called for local cost sharing for land
enhancement projects.
And so, when this enrolled bill came to the White House for signature,
proposing authorization of what seemed like a very large amount of money, it
was carefully reviewed. There were lots of projects without reports, or with
district engineer reports only, and no Board of Engineers report or no division
report, and definitely no Chief of Engineers report. And then there were a
number of them where they had a Chief of Engineers report and the report was
still sitting on my desk for comments as to the Bureau of the Budget's position.
I was able to get most of those out, but still, there were a lot of them that
didn't have a House document number-hadn't been published.
It was obvious that enactment of this bill would be breaking the President's
budget policy. At the same time, the bill for the Soil Conservation Service,
which really got the Soil Conservation Service into small flood control projects
with both feet by liberalizing the cost sharing, was under consideration.
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