Water Resources People and Issues
But the `44 act authorized the Corps to build recreation facilities. It did not
specify that recreation should be calculated towards the cost-benefit ratio to
justify a project.
A: Well, remember, the defining statement that Congress made about benefits in
the
Flood Control Act was that if the benefits to whomsoever they may
accrue shall exceed the costs, then federal participation was warranted.
But the Congress never specified how you calculate the benefits. That left the
door open, and so the Corps could use recreation benefits. If that had been an
authorization for the Bureau of Reclamation and Michael Straus had been the
commissioner, they would have picked up the ball and run with it. As it was,
they had nonreimbursable allocations to recreation in some of those reclamation
projects. This was one of the things that Budget Circular A-47 tried to put a
stop to by requiring a local contribution of half the cost of whatever the benefit
was.
Land/Water Conservation Fund Act
I may have commented on the recreation legislation to the staff of the House
Interior Committee, but I didn't do any major study on it. And the Land and
Water Conservation Fund Act more or less stemmed from the work of the
Recreational Resources Review Commission, which broached that idea. The
Interior Department picked up the idea from the commission report and sent up
the proposed legislation. But no, I wasn't consulted on that.
How about the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act? That was passed in `68, I believe.
A: Yes. Incidentally, one time somebody wanted to give me an award for being
the father of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act because there is somewhere in the
Senate committee report some kind of a favorable comment about this concept,
suggesting we ought to consider the importance of preserving some of these
rivers in their natural state. I couldn't accept an award for that because the idea
came from the National Park Service in the report that they wrote for the
Senate committee. The report was prepared by Ben Thompson, a staff member
of the Park Service. I think he originated the idea. And so when somebody
called me about that many years later, I referred them to Ben Thompson.
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