Theodore M.
politically you more or less had to have something to get enough votes,
something in every state.
In the meantime, it was still the Public Health Service that had the Water
Pollution Control program. They moved right in and they set up a number of
research laboratories, including the Robert S. Kerr Laboratory in Ada,
Oklahoma. They set up a laboratory in the Great Lakes, and they took the
regional approach, and they had these several laboratories and really were
much closer to the idea that the Kerr Committee had than was the Water
Resources Research Act. But, politics being what it is, the Water Research Act
had the benefit of something for every state, and that's why it got through.
Clint Anderson didn't have anything to do with the water pollution control labs
because they were handled by another committee in the Senate, but they were
certainly an outgrowth of the Kerr Committee. They may have even been
entitled before the Kerr Committee report was completed because this was
something that we talked about a lot when we were working with Mel
trying to get the Public Health Service to help us during the process of
preparing the program report.
The other outcome of the Kerr Committee report-I'm talking now about the
major recommendations- w a s for the river basin planning and the support for
the states. My first efforts on that line, which were for Senator Kerr, were to
draft a bill. For this I had to consult with the Legislative Council, which had
to draft all bills.
They insisted on a rather arcane formula for dividing up federal grants among
states. It was the same formula that had been used earlier for dividing up the
money for the water pollution control grants. You should remember that the
early water pollution control effort was grants for planning, coming out of the
1948 and the 195 1 or
Water Pollution Control Acts. The formula was a
rather difficult thing to understand, the way part of the money was going to be
divided up according to population and part of it divided in accordance to
problems, and this was so complicated that the first bill didn't get very far.
I'm not sure whether it was ever introduced, but later a bill was sent up by the
Interior Department which eventually became the Water Resources Planning
Act. This went far beyond what Senator Kerr had envisioned because it started
off with establishing the Water Resources Council, and Senator Kerr was not
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