Water Resources People and Issues
well known to Howard Cook, and we tried to get their ideas as to how we
should, narrow the focus of the study. I think we had just one meeting with all
three of them, and they weren't able to help very much.
I should have mentioned earlier that on my first day of work for the
commission on the last day of December in 1968, I had worked up the
justification for a budget of
for the next fiscal year. I was able to get
it printed in the budget which was going to press that very day, so we didn't
have to go up with a supplemental which might have taken ages to get.
So we had a budget request without having had a Budget Bureau hearing,
which is rather unusual. We did have a hearing on the Hill at which everything
was sweetness and light. We had the House and the Senate hearings on the
same day, to accommodate Chuck who was very well respected by everybody
on the Hill, and I guess I was also.
There's not going to be enough time for me to tell much of the detail about the
study program that was being formulated during the early days of the
commission. It was a rather full program because the commission refused to
narrow the study down. Howard and I felt that we could not do a good job on
over a hundred potential studies that we had on our list. These were all in areas
of possible improvement in water policy, and the commission took the position
that it couldn't decide to throw anything out without having the background
that the study was intended to provide. Some of them were in narrow areas and
some of them were broad. They were grouped into or 20 special study areas
which I thought would provide a focus for a rather succinct final report.
I was very fortunate in being able to assemble a very competent and hard
working staff. The division chiefs were
Koelzer, from the Harza
Engineering Company, where he had worked on multiple purpose projects all
over the world but primarily in the United States; Lyle Craine, on a sabbatical
from the University of Michigan, who had been in the Interior Department in
the Truman administration as a member of the secretary's policy planning staff;
and Phil Glick, who came to us from being chief counsel for the Water
Resources Council. He used to joke about being called "counsel for the
council." Each division chief then recruited his own staff. Phil was the last of
the division chiefs to come on board, and his immediate reaction was he wanted
to bring his whole staff from the Water Resources Council over. I had to stop
him from doing that, and he eventually recruited a very fine group of Western
Previous Page
