Water Resources People and Issues
The commission was adamant in recommending that project beneficiaries
should pay the economic costs of development, but always put in that you
should give due consideration to the government's role in environmental
protection. So it's not a rigidly economic report. Charlie Myers would have
made it so. He was very rigid on economics, and he said, "If you want to have
a scenic river, you've got to have some way to collect some money from the
people that look at it." He was more rigid on reimbursement than our
economists were.
Q: Let me ask you, before you go ahead with the reception to the report, I want
to ask you one more question about the organization of the people who were
involved. There were evidently panels that were established too. I presume
these were advisory panels on various facets of water resources, everything
from the economics of discounting to weather forecasting or whatever. What
role did these panels have? Were they frankly cosmetic? Did they have
substantive roles? What purpose did they serve?
A: I mentioned that earlier but I didn't call them panels. They were study
committees set up to produce reports.
Koelzer set one up on planning and
it was chaired by Harvey Banks. That's what you're referring to, isn't it?
Q: Okay.
A: And we had an environmental panel on which we had Bostwick
and
George
from the Wood Hole Laboratory. It was a good
environmental panel. We had a good pollution control panel headed by Dwight
Metzler of Kansas. They were not just advisory because they were writing the
background reports for publication. The environmental panel
do a major
report, but it helped us to formulate a contract with Charlie Goldman out at
Davis, who produced the big environmental report.
Q: Were the panelists paid or did they just donate their time?
A: I think they just donated their time, just like they would have for a National
Academy of Sciences committee.
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