Theodore
it could be done. He sat in on the meetings with federal agency representatives
to help with the coordination. People like Nat Wollman and Howard Cook
were really the indispensable glue which helped me pull all of this together.
Out of it we developed a water supply/demand study which was going to be
done by Resources for the Future with the aid of the federal agency committee
to provide the data from their agencies. Of course, this was wonderful for
Resources for the Future, because otherwise, they'd have had an awful time to
get all this data together, and really, we got hundreds of thousands of dollars'
worth of effort out of the federal agencies.
So we developed that study as the means to pull together all of the background
studies contemplated in part one of the original Ackerman outlines. The water
supply/demand relationship study hadn't been in the original Ackerman plan
of study.
Did you get into any questions of urban water supply?
Yes, we had a study on municipal water and we had a study on pollution
abatement, so we got into urban water problems, which were handled at that
time by the Public Health Service under the new Department of Health,
Education and Welfare.
Anyway, the water supply/demand study was the first of the really analytical
studies, but the rest of them I left for phase two, because we had enough of a
problem to get these 20 or 25 background studies pulled together.
I'll never forget the way Nat Wollman helped pull together those meetings with
the federal agency people. And the Geological Survey staff was wonderful also.
They said, "Yes, we can do it." Of course, they were hydrologists, just
looking at the strictly hydrological part of it.
But some of the other agencies, particularly the Public Health Service which
handled water pollution control, was very negative. Their representative was
a good friend of mine, Melvin
and he was very much concerned about
some of the short cuts that we were taking in putting together this water
supply/demand study.
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