Water Resources People and Issues
I was working too hard and didn't get to know her as well as I would have
liked to.
There was one more hearing on the National Water Commission report in
July when the federal agencies testified. At the hearing on June
just the
commissioners had testified, and it was all sweetness and light except for what
seemed to be amazement that they hadn't really come out foursquare against
interbasin transfer. The hearing had been chaired by Frank Church who had
been quite upset by earlier proposals to take water out of the upper Snake River
to augment the flow of the Colorado River.
At the July hearing, representatives of the Water Resources Council and the
federal agencies testified. My recollection is that they mostly hadn't had time
enough to study the
and the hearing concluded with the committee
asking the Water Resources Council to respond to a series of questions.
The Water Resources Council was required by the National Water Commission
Act to send comments on the report to the President and to the Congress. So
many commissions had written reports which were sent to the President, and
that's the last you ever hear of the report. There was a different provision
governing this commission, which I had suggested to Wayne Aspinall when his
committee was considering its authorization. That may have also been in the
earlier bill introduced by a congressman from California, which I had worked
on. The intent was to make sure that it got to the Congress. But it also required
that the President comment on it and send his recommendations to the
Congress. This was never done, and the report remains in limbo to this day.
Incidentally, we printed 9,000 copies and sent one to every congressional
office. We also sent copies to the agencies downtown and to everybody that
had been on any of our panels or had worked with us. I think we distributed
about 2,000 copies that way. The Government Printing Office sold the other
7,000 copies and later reprinted it. When they were all gone, the plates were
loaned to the Water Information Center on Long Island and they reprinted it.
One of the interesting things was that when we went to mail those copies out,
at least five tons of reports, our local post office wouldn't take them; we had
paid our postage bill for that fiscal year on the basis of the preceding fiscal
year. So when all of a sudden we were dumping five tons of reports on a little
neighborhood post office, they wouldn't take them. Bob Baker then found he
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