Water Resources People and Issues
By statute, the commissioners were allowed to be paid for the days that they
worked. It was decided early on that no commissioner would charge for more
than four days a month, two of which would be for the meetings and two days
at home. So these positions were no sinecures. Further, we didn't provide for
a commissioner to have a paid staff person in his home office,
That would exclude travel days, I assume.
Yes. Because of that limit, they didn't charge us for travel time. Most of the
commissioners were going to be traveling anyway. They were all very busy
people, so 0 a day was more or less pocket money for them. We did
authorize them to travel first class, and they all traveled first class except
Chuck
He always traveled coach. As a director of United Airlines, he
did that because he wanted to see how they were treating people who rode in
the back of the plane. I was also authorized to travel first class, but I always
traveled coach because I hate to waste money. I kept a very tight rein on the
expenditures of the staff of the commission.
What surprises me is that considering the number of people you hired and the
number of people you contracted with, in the end you could come up with X
number of recommendations that must have reflected at least a majority view
if not the unanimous view of the commission. And these recommendations
were not just
they were substantive and they were controversial. Can
you explain a little bit more about how that evolved?
A: We worked pretty hard to get unanimous decisions. Of course, the staff didn't
have a vote. And we had some studies that were never finished because they
weren't any good. For one study we contracted with the University of Chicago
for work that Jack Schaefer was going to do. Jack Schaefer then left the
university, and they turned the study over to someone else. The study was on
the Muskegon project in Michigan. It was such a lousy report and we had
already made a partial payment which couldn't be recovered, so I refused to
pay any more and ordered the contract terminated. We were threatened with
legal action by the University of Chicago, but in a phone call from the vice
president of the university, I turned the threat right around, saying, "If you
pursue this, I will publish that report and put the name of the University of
Chicago on it." And I told him to look at the report and let me know if he
wanted me to do that. Never heard another word from him.