Water Resources
and Issues
in Dick Carpenter, decided that he didn't want to let this new little
commission, which had a total budget of only about million, take on the
whole million study for the whole academy which cut across the interests
of other units. We argued against the decision but we lost, and a decision was
made to have an overall committee with one representative from each of the
eight commissions and assemblies-or maybe just seven of them, because one
of them was international.
The first thing they did was throw out our rationale, which I believe was a
rational basis for the study, and let each group propose a study. Just by
coincidence it happened that there was one study for each of the commissions
and assemblies that was involved. It's somewhat like what happens when you
write an omnibus bill with a number of members on the committee and just by
chance you happen to have a project in each member's district. So that's the
way that study was done.
We lost control of the overall study, but the Commission on Natural Resources
and the Environmental Studies Board did have the major role because we had
the overall decisionmaking study, which put it all together, and we had the
research study. It was a very interesting study. At the beginning I kept
meticulous files on how it was being done, which soon filled several file
drawers. The amount of paper you can generate with million is just
unbelievable!
Q: Was there one specifically on water quality?
A: No. But there should have been. By that time we had a contract with the
Rockefeller Commission and Joe Moore, the study director, was enraged when
he found we were talking about the possibility of including a study of water
quality. The executive director of the Rockefeller Commission, Fred Clarke,
who was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, didn't think there
would be any problem, but Joe Moore thought it would be a conflict of
interest. He even objected to our having a study dealing with municipal sludge
management because he felt that the National Commission on Water Quality
should be the only entity working on any aspect of water pollution control. So
we didn't include a study on water, but we did have the one on municipal
sludge management. It was chaired by Harvey Banks, one of three studies that
stayed in the Environmental Studies Board.
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