Theodore
A: Certainly Ed Ackerman had that feeling. Remember he had served with
President Truman's Water Policy Commission, which recommended
decentralizing planning into river basin commissions, and also with the Budget
Bureau trying to reduce the federal role to hold down the budget. So, Ed
Ackerman had that at the back of his mind when he laid out the first draft of
a program. This was before I was involved. We used Ed as a consultant and we
talked about the role of the states. He used to say that he felt there was a
resurgence in the states' ability to deal with their own water resources
problems. At about the same time, you remember, there was the Kestenbaum
Commission which made a report out of which grew the Advisory Committee
on Inter-Governmental Relationships, and that was a current document at that
time.
So Ed really felt strongly that there was a resurgence in the states. One of the
things we did at the outset of the Senate Select Committee was to write to all
states and ask them for their views as to what were their water resource
problems, what should be done about them, and what was the relationship of
water resources to the national interest. We printed the responses as Committee
Print Number 6. It was a big, thick document with all these reports, but it was
very, very unsatisfactory. It showed that some states, like California, were
probably way ahead of the federal government. Really, the Central Valley
project of California and the whole panoply of works out there was all laid out
in a state of California report written about 1930, and the Bureau of
Reclamation only came in when the state couldn't raise the money. A few of
the other states were also well advanced in water resources.
But when we went to a state like New York with a letter to the governor, and
we got an answer from the State Department of Agriculture saying that, "The
real problem we have in New York with water is providing water for
agriculture, some of us felt that they didn't have the ability to focus on the
major problems. It seems obvious to us that the New York City water supply
and the pollution of the Hudson River, which was what kept New York from
using the Hudson River, were more important problems. Even at that time, the
groundwater in Long Island was known to not be inexhaustible. So the response
we got made us feel that they didn't know what their major problems were
going to be in the future.
Then we got a letter from an assistant to the governor of West Virginia, and
apparently they didn't have anything going on in the water resources field. I
141
Previous Page
