Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
the flood pool because, should it disintegrate and pass on downstream, it would then threaten
the system.
They were very clear encroachments. We submitted a plan of how we'd take care of
eliminating them, and the local developers went straight to the secretary, who intervened and
started challenging us on why we were doing it. We made the typical arguments of upstream
versus downstream interests. We had a federal project that is designed to prevent certain
flooding levels downstream. If we can't use the pool designed for it, how can we deliver the
lower levels downstream to avoid the flooding?
It was the perennial argument of whose interests come first, downstream or upstream? In our
view, this had been decided when Congress approved a federal project and we spent federal
taxpayer money to build the project. The encroachers were not letting us use the full value of
the project, and so to us it was pretty clear. To the secretary, it was not so clear.
Over some time period, the issue went back and forth. There was a lot of interaction in order
to come up with an acceptable policy position.
At this time, we were beginning to feel that we were in a bit of quagmire of--I won't say
indecision--but of a process that was not very precise. On day one you put out an order.
Then things changed, certainly, but how they changed evolved slowly, over time. We worked
that over an eight-month period--visits to Washington, visits to Ohio, back and forth, this
actor and that actor, different interpretations as it evolved. The division staff, most
particularly, was comfortable interpreting things cleanly according to a set of statutes and
regulations--rather precisely. In a changing policy period, they were unsettled and had
difficulty in knowing how to work things.
In the end, Gianelli more or less gave the issue to his new deputy who had come aboard. Bob
Dawson and I spent a lot of days on the telephone dialoguing the wordings and meanings of
sentences. "Would this be acceptable, or not acceptable, and why?" We negotiated a position
in the middle, something certainly less than what we were asking, but it didn't quite give
away the farm. We felt we could live with it based on the small probabilities that certain
events would happen. Maybe the absolute condition we were seeking didn't need to be.
So, in answer to your question about how did things happen with the change in
administration, I'd say they evolved rather slowly. The people who probably had an
understanding of the compass direction in which they wanted to go nevertheless were faced
with the reality of dealing with real situations, real policies, real reaction from interest
groups, real reactions from Congress. They learned--in a couple of instances probably
painfully--that you just don't put out an edict and it happens. You have to work it out over
time.
Then we were the ones trying to execute, and we were the ones that had fed the realities to
them when they'd asked the questions. Sometimes they asked the right questions early
enough; sometimes they didn't. Because they weren't always free in identifying where they
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