Water Resources People and issues
a plan of study. And it was pretty clear that the commissioners had no
preconceived ideas about what this commission should do.
One of the things that they did understand was that we would have to study
interbasin transfers because of the background of the commission. Actually, we
were the only federal agency that could study interbasin transfers because of
Scoop Jackson's provision in other legislation to the effect that no agency shall
study interbasin transfer without specific approval of Congress, and we had that
specific approval in the National Water Commission Act.
Although at first we didn't get the specific views of the commissioners as to
what we should study, there was no lack of suggestions sent in from others.
Professor Len Dworsky at Cornell sent us a publication resulting from a student
project that he called, "An agenda for the National Water Commission. I was
deluged with all kinds of ideas from other sources. People from TRW met with
us, wanted me to contract the whole study out to them, and they would plan it
and execute it and produce a report. All we had to do was give them the
money. I was flabbergasted. couldn't conceive of such a thing. But apparently
they had done that for some other commissions. From the current vantage
point, I guess it would be called privatization.
It was obvious to me that none of these people had anybody that knew any
more about water policy than Howard Cook and I did, so we soon stopped
paying any attention to them and devoted our time to recruiting a staff. And for
the first study we took advantage of some water demand studies that were
already underway at Resources for the Future and began negotiating a
source contract with them to provide us with a report on future demands for
water in three sectors of the economy. This was one of the very obvious things
that we knew would be needed. It didn't take much time to draw up the
contract, and it didn't cost very much because Chuck Howe and Bob Young,
who were going to do the work, were already working at Resources for the
Future. So this became the first study, and when Chuck testified at our
appropriation hearings, it was already under contract.
In order to handle our contracts, I very soon hired an administrative man. The
job didn't pay enough to attract someone like Bob Blakeley, but I was able to
hire a man with experience with defense contractors as the administrator. His
name was Bob Baker, and he went right into action because he knew
contracting from both sides, having been a colonel in the Air Force or Army
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