Cadillac Desert (36 page)

Predictably, Dominy managed to overcome such scruples after he was appointed commissioner. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Bureau launched a mighty effort to push forward the Garrison and Oahe projects, enormous diversions from Lake Sacajawea and Oahe Reservoir to compensate North and South Dakota (if not the dispossessed tribes) for the land drowned by the Corps. But the irrigation canals and local storage reservoirs would have consumed nearly as much productive farmland as the irrigation water would have created—in the case of the Garrison Diversion Project, 220,000 acres for canals and reservoirs versus 250,000 new acres irrigated. In addition, Garrison, in its original version, would have converted some 73,000 more acres of superb waterfowl habitat—prairie marshes and potholes used by hundreds of thousands of migrating ducks—into farm fields. Not only that, but it could easily have introduced parasites and competitive trash fish from the Missouri into streams emptying into Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba, threatening very productive pike and lake trout fisheries. The Canadians, in fact, had been screaming objections into the deaf ear of the Bureau for years, and even sent a series of stern diplomatic protests to the State Department.

In the late 1970s, the Oahe Diversion Project, after reigning for years as the biggest political issue in South Dakota, was defeated by the very same farmers for whose alleged benefit it was to be built, and one of its principal champions, former Senator George McGovern, saw his political career buried with it. McGovern’s surprising loss, according to local political insiders, had as much to do with his unwavering support for a suddenly unpopular Oahe Project as it did with the campaign mounted against him by the ultraconservative Right. Garrison, in 1985, was partly completed and still alive, and a bobtailed version of the project seems likely to be built, irrigating perhaps 130,000 acres (devoted mainly to surplus crops) at a cost of $1,650,000 per farm. Energy requirements for pumping, which totaled 288,000 kilowatts under the original plan, would also be reduced, but how the dams can pump water to 130,000 acres
and
sell power at market rates to subsidize the water costs is a question that no one, least of all the Bureau, can answer.

As for the other dozens of projects assigned to the Bureau, few have been built, but the Corps, despite the antipathy of the local citizenry, has tried to steal away even these. On May 9, 1963, Dominy’s regional chief in Billings, Bruce Johnson, reported that the Corps “is not dismayed by the opposition” to two newly proposed dams on the Missouri, Fort Benton and High Cow Creek—nor, Johnson said, would “the highly preliminary stage of the basic investigations ... deter them.... They will, I think, seek authority to build both dams.” As a result, Johnson advocated “that we grit our collective teeth and decide to use the reconnaissance data that we have so we can go to the ‘hill’ just as quickly as the Corps does and ask for authority [to build] without additional investigation.” If such “additional investigation” (reconnaissance data are usually based on a mere desultory look) disclosed that either dam would be a waste of money, that was the taxpayers’ problem.

And, by now, it is, even if Fort Benton and High Cow Creek dams have not yet been built. Between the money-losing irrigation ventures in the Missouri Basin and the river’s mediocre power potential, the Missouri Basin “Fund” appears to be in unhealthy financial shape. The problem is, no one knows exactly how bad things are. According to a Carter administration audit, Missouri Basin power is
already
vastly oversubscribed, and the Corps and the Bureau, employing some complex economic chicanery even the auditors couldn’t quite decipher, may be borrowing on “anticipated” revenues from as far away as the next century, just as New York City did in the early 1970s before some of its elected officials almost went to jail. “Our conclusion is that the financial posture of Pick-Sloan is, at best, based on an uncertainty,” the auditors wrote. “At worst, it is based on an unreality.”

The “reconciliation” of the Pick Plan and the Sloan Plan had taken a mere two days; the political fallout, the environmental damage, and the drain on the Treasury that have resulted seem likely to go on forever.

It was back in California, meanwhile, that the bitterest rivalry and the most vicious infighting between the Bureau and the Corps continued to occur. Awkward, expensive, and redundant as it was, Congress had at least come up with some kind of division of responsibilities in the Missouri Basin. The same applied to the Columbia Basin. In California, however, the two giant bureaucracies were left pretty much to fight it out among themselves. Their rivalry was a wonderful opportunity for the state’s irrigation lobby; the growers could sit back and smile coyly as they were madly pursued by rival suitors in hard hats. But it was an equally wonderful opportunity in the 1960s for Governor Pat Brown, under whose leadership the state was trying, all by itself, to complete the most expensive water project ever built.

On Wednesday, January 27, 1965, a highly secret meeting was held in the office of California’s resources secretary, Hugo Fisher. In attendance were most of the oligarchs of water development in California: Pat Brown’s water resources director, Bill Warne; Robert Pafford, the Bureau of Reclamation’s regional director; Brigadier General Arthur Frye of the Corps of Engineers; Ralph Brody, the chairman of the California Water Commission; state senator James Cobey; and assemblyman Carley Porter, the chief author of the bill that authorized the State Water Project in 1959. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the future of Marysville Dam.

With all the big Sierra rivers developed close to their limits, precious few good damsites were left anywhere in the state except on the North Coast. There were, however, still three rather marginal sites in the Sierra foothills which the Bureau wanted to develop in order to augment the water supply of the Central Valley Project. One was New Melones on the Stanislaus River. Another was Auburn Dam on the American River. The third was Marysville Dam on the Yuba River. Of the three rivers, the Yuba, at the time, had the blackest reputation. It had devastated Yuba City and forced the evacuation of twenty thousand people during an awesome flood in 1955, and just a few weeks earlier it had flooded menacingly again during the great Christmas storm of 1964. The dam, therefore, was of interest not only to the Bureau but to the Corps of Engineers. No one, however, was more interested in it than the governor of California and his director of water resources, Bill Warne.

Brown and Warne had an unenviable dilemma on their hands, even if they brought it on themselves. They had misrepresented, either unintentionally or by design, the cost of the State Water Project, and were left without the funds to finish it. The state had signed binding contracts to deliver 4,230,000 acre-feet of water; the $1.75 billion bond issue that the voters had approved, however, would not even suffice to build Oroville Dam, San Luis Dam, and the 444-mile aqueduct down the San Joaquin Valley and over the mountains to Los Angeles. All of those works could deliver a safe yield of only 2.5 million acre-feet of water. Somehow, the state had to come up with nearly two million additional acre-feet—quite an imposing agenda. The water was there, on any number of northern California rivers. But since the voters had just shouldered the most expensive state bond issue in history, the money to develop it was emphatically not.

Marysville Dam, therefore, was exactly the opportunity Brown and Warne were looking for, provided the State Project could gain rights to some or all of the water and contribute little or nothing to the cost of the dam. No federal dam could be built without the consent of the governor of the state. The question, then, was which of the potential builders would give the state what it wanted: the Bureau or the Corps.

The report on the meeting which Bob Pafford of the Bureau sent to his superior in Washington, Commissioner Floyd Dominy, began on a gloomy note. The state was very much inclined to let the Corps build Marysville, for obvious reaons. There would be no federal claim on the water in a purported flood-control reservoir and no strings attached to its use, as there would be if the Bureau built the dam. Pafford, however, held out one hopeful prospect to Dominy: “California might be willing to recommend changing their position from one of strong support for immediate construction and operation of Marysville Reservoir by the Corps of Engineers, with the State taking the conservation water via Title III, to one of support for immediate authorization of Marysville for early construction by the Corps, but with the project to be integrated fully with the Central Valley Project.”

The Title III of which Pafford spoke referred to a section of the federal Water Supply Act of 1958, which allowed water from a federal dam to be sold to another political entity, such as a city or state, provided the water was used only for municipal or industrial purposes—that is, not for irrigation. The provision, in fact, owed its existence to the earlier battle on the Kings and the Kern rivers; there was so much resentment over the fact that the state’s biggest growers had gotten an enormous supply of water virtually free from the Corps that a number of Congressmen vowed never to let it happen again, and the result was Title III. But Brown and Bill Warne’s predicament was that the State Water Project was first and foremost an
irrigation
project. The specter of water famine in southern California gave the project its moral justification, and Los Angeles offered the assessed property wealth needed to guarantee the bonds, but the first deliveries of water would go to the big corporate farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. Los Angeles wasn’t scheduled to receive its full entitlement for many years—and, in fact, would take only a fraction of each year’s entitlement all through the 1970s and early 1980s, permitting most of the water to be sold, at bargain prices, as “surplus” water to the same big growers in the San Joaquin Valley.

Pafford told Dominy that he had cautioned Warne about the inherent legal risks in trying to use the water from a federally built reservoir to augment a state project whose main purpose, at least for now, was irrigation. “I pointed out that authorization for the sale of water under Title III ... might severely limit the use of this water, since the Act referred to the use of water only for municipal and industrial purposes.” In other words, if the Corps built the dam, the whole arrangement would be quite naked—the Kings and the Kern all over again—and probably enjoinable in a court of law. If the Bureau built the dam, on the other hand, the water, in theory, would have to go into the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project’s main beneficiaries, the big San Joaquin growers, could not touch a drop.

There had to be a way out of the predicament, and Bill Warne was canny and cynical enough to come up with it. What if the Corps built the dam on the promise that the water would “someday” flow into the Central Valley Project? And what if, since there was still plenty of surplus water sloshing around in the CVP, the Bureau let the State Water Project “borrow” it for a while?

What Warne wanted to do, Pafford confided to Dominy (and he apparently thought it wasn’t a bad idea), was create exactly such an arrangement as “a test of this Act”—by which he meant Title III of the Flood Control Act of 1958. If the Corps built the reservoir and the state took the water with no strings attached, they were risking a head-on collision with existing law. But promising the water to the Bureau—eventually—might provide a legal out; Congress should have no objection to California’s “borrowing” it for twenty or thirty years. That would give the state time enough to climb out from under the staggering pile of debt that the construction of its huge water project had dumped on it, and to build the necessary works to develop the full 4,230,000 acre-feet of water it was legally obligated to provide.

If the Bureau acceded to Bill Warne’s plan, it wouldn’t get to do what it loved best: build a dam. But at least it would get something out of it instead of being boxed out entirely, as it was on the Kings and the Kern and the Kaweah and the Tule.

That it was willing to let itself be so used is an indication of how desperate the Bureau had become since the Corps of Engineers began trying to muscle its way into its domain. If anything, Pafford ought to have been incensed by Warne’s idea. After all, the Bureau, more than any other single entity, had made California into the wealthy and populous state it was. It built Hoover Dam for Los Angeles and the Imperial Valley, and Parker and Davis and Imperial dams as well. It built the Central Valley Project to rescue the growers from economic suicide by groundwater overdraft. It was paying nearly half the cost of the world’s fourth-largest dam, San Luis, which would store water jointly for both the CVP and the State Project; without such assistance, the California project might have fallen on its face. And on top of this, the state’s big farmers, when they began to receive cheap “surplus” water from the State Project, would be in a position to engage in cutthroat competition with the Bureau’s constituency, the smaller farmers. From the point of view of many small farmers—and this would be borne out later in actual fact—the expansion of the State Water Project was one of the worst things that could happen.

Not only did outrage fail Bob Pafford, but he was willing to go the Corps one better—so badly did he want an opportunity to construct a new dam. Should the Bureau, instead of the Corps, be allowed to build Marysville Dam, he wrote Dominy, “I restated our offer to make water from Marysville available to the state on an interim basis
at a price no greater
than under a Title III arrangement with the Corps” (emphasis added). Then he added a cryptic, furtive remark: “It was concluded that it would not be necessary to include this possibility in the State’s comments.”