Water Resources People and Issues
at all interested in the Water Resources Council. He was interested in
comprehensive plans.
He had no problem with the river basin commission idea, but the report had
said, "the federal government in cooperation with the states," was to do the
planning. he had been thinking in terms of the AWR [Arkansas-White-Red]
approach, which was essentially a river basin commission although the
authority for it was in the Army Corps of Engineers. So Senator Kerr would
have taken a position against the idea of a water resources council because he
liked the system the way it was. He was getting what he wanted for the state
of Oklahoma and didn't want to complicate the system.
The bill went through several drafts over the next several years and finally
became the Water Resources Planning Act of 1965. I have documented all this
in a report called "The History of the Implementation of the Recommendations
of the Senate Select Committee," and I'm hesitant to go into any more detail
because it's all laid out in that committee print.
Well, let me ask you some conceptual questions. Maybe that might help us
on what you're talking about. Again, I don't mean to sound like a broken
record. However, there has been some dispute among people-historians and
others-about what was the intent in setting up something like a water resources
council.
Some people argue it was an attempt to decentralize the administration and the
power, really, in relationship to water resources development in this country,
so that you would have more input from nonfederal interests, not just states but
regional authorities and people like that. Others would argue that there really
was no reallocation of power or anything like that, that it was purely an
administrative convenience, almost, rather than anything else.
How do you see this?
A: Well, that brings up something else that was happening about the same time.
You remember we had the
sometimes called the FIREBRICK , and
eventually the
sometimes called the I C E W A T E R, that had a
Subcommittee on Benefits and Costs, which produced the Green Book on
economic analysis of water projects. So it was probably as a result of the
Senate committee recommending that the federal government should prepare
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