Theodore M.
and keep up-to-date the river basin plans, that the Inter-Agency Committee on
Water Resources [ICWR], issued a set of standards and procedures which was
sent up to Congress and published as Senate Document 97, setting forth the
procedures for doing the planning and analysis. And so I guess you might say
that was a response to the Senate committee's recommendation, but not in
exactly the way that the Senate committee had in mind. But it did come up and
it provided a kind of a framework.
But it certainly couldn't be taken as a shifting of power to the states; at least,
I never took it that way. It attempted to standardize the federal approach, it
went into the interest rates and the economic analysis and so forth, and it went
into the environmental side, the fish and wildlife, and the recreation. But it
wasn't anything that Senator Kerr had envisaged. It may well be that Senator
Anderson had some kind of hidden agenda on turning power over to the states,
but he never divulged it to me. I don't think Senate Document 97 ever became
congressional policy. It was really just a statement of the policies the
administration was going to use in project analysis. I'd have to read what the
President said when he sent it up, but I don't think it ever had as much standing
as Budget Circular A-47, which I believe it replaced.
Well it makes a strong pitch, of course, for multipurpose planning.
Yes, that's true but multipurpose planning has been an idea that's been in
existence ever since back in the conservation movement when it was espoused
by the National Conservation Commission and the Inland Waterways
Commission. I'm not sure that anybody ever really understood what it meant
back in 1910. But as the ICWR studies evolved into Senate Document 97, they
eventually provided a kind of a foundation for moving ahead with the principles
and standards promulgated by the Water Resources Council.
I'm probably wandering away from the thrust of your question, but I didn't
sense at that time any real consensus that the Congress wanted to move power
back into the states. And I think any thrust of that nature in the administration
was largely as a result of the Bureau of the Budget's wanting to reduce the
federal budget. But they were approaching it more through cost sharing than
through putting responsibility on the states.
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