Cadillac Desert (53 page)

By 1967, it had become obvious to everyone but Dominy and Carl Hayden that the Grand Canyon dams would have to go. Rescue for the Colorado Basin might never come without them, but the Central Arizona Project would never be built with them. The problem, for Stewart Udall, was how to sneak the amended legislation past Hayden and Dominy. Hayden might not be too much of a problem; he was old and senile and in the hospital half the time, and he was desperate to see the CAP authorized before his death, which might come at any time. It was Dominy—bullheaded, willful, obsessed with defeating Brower—who somehow had to be handled. The opportunity came fairly soon. With the Bureau now helping to build dams all over the world, the commissioner had to make an annual global inspection of projects-in-progress; it was a condition imposed by the Agency for International Development, which was pumping billions of dollars into dam construction, and even as the Colorado River battle raged away Dominy had to absent himself for a few weeks. In early 1967, the commissioner grabbed his hat and was gone. Almost as soon as his plane left the runway at Dulles Airport, Udall was telling his Assistant Secretary, Ken Holum, to take Bridge Canyon Dam out of the CAP legislation and come up with an alternative before Dominy returned. The main objective was to find enough power to pump the water to central Arizona. The means of financing a rescue project would simply have to be put off. A Dominy representative would, of course, have to sit on the task force, and Udall had just the person in mind—Daniel Dreyfus. Publicly, Dreyfus could write a good rah-rah speech for Dominy about Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon dams. Privately, he believed neither in them nor, for that matter, in the CAP. He wasn’t even sure he believed in the Bureau of Reclamation anymore.

“The hardest part for me was getting the regional commissioners to go along,” Dreyfus would recall in his Senate office in 1981. “Dominy had them all so scared that when I told them what we were up to, they wanted to crawl in a hole. ‘Oh, no,
Floyd’s
got to be here!’ ‘You know what
Floyd
would think of this.’
‘Floyd
will shit a brick.’ One regional director was so terrified I had to fly out to Phoenix to put some fiber in his backbone. The solution itself was kind of clumsy, but it was simple. We decided to buy a share of the Navajo Powerplant in northern Arizona. For the first time, the Bureau was going to own something it always hated—a piece of a great big smoke-belching coal-fired powerplant. It didn’t solve a damn thing except that it gave us the power to pump water to central Arizona. The fact is we were licked. The conservationists and the press and ultimately the public licked the Bureau of Reclamation, and the last person in the world to admit it was Dominy. He wouldn’t admit it, but I can’t believe he didn’t know what was coming. By the time he took off to go overseas he was fighting a rearguard action, and he knew it. Maybe being out of the country was a way for him to save his honor. When he returned, I was the one who had to go see him with a copy of the agreement we’d worked out. I thought he was going to go through the roof, but Dominy always had a way of catching you off guard. His reaction was complete and total lack of interest. He already knew all about it. He just said, ‘I don’t even want to hear about it,’ and told me to get the hell out of his office. He didn’t even look up from what he was reading on his desk.”

Like the westbound wagons that had to jettison furniture, food, even water in order to plow through the desert sands, the Central Arizona Project was finally light enough to move. The Colorado River Basin Project Act was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson on September 30, 1968—the most expensive single authorization in history. Besides the CAP, it authorized Hooker Dam in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico, the aqueduct from Lake Mead to Las Vegas, the Dixie Project in Utah, and the Uintah Unit of the Central Utah Project—the first piece of a water-diversion scheme that promised to be nearly as grandiose as the CAP. It also authorized the San Miguel, Dallas Creek, West Divide, Dolores, and Animas La Plata projects in Colorado, and it authorized a Lower Colorado Development Fund, still penniless, to build an augmentation project that hadn’t yet been defined, let alone approved. Almost unnoticed alongside everything else, the bill made deliverance of Mexico’s 1.5 million acre-feet of water—of tolerably sweet water—a
national
responsibility, whatever that meant. Loosely interpreted, it might mean a pipeline from Lake Superior to Mexicali.

The five Colorado projects—which could easily add a cool $1 billion to the cost of everything else—were an object lesson in the workings of the Congressional pork barrel. They were put into the bill at the insistence of Wayne Aspinall, the black-eyed former schoolteacher with a testy principal’s disposition who had climbed from a little western Colorado town to become the chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. Aspinall distrusted urban, expansionist California with all the recondite loathing of a small-town mind, and he didn’t trust Arizona much more. The overallocated river ran right under the window of his expensive home on Aspinall Drive in Palisade, Colorado, and he figured that Colorado had better extract every drop of its rightful share or California and Arizona would take it and never give it back. If the CAP was to get past the chairman of the House Interior Committee, Colorado was going to be satisfied first.

The problem was that by 1968, there wasn’t a single irrigation project left on the West Slope of the Rockies that was economically feasible. The best ones—or, to put it more accurately, the least senseless ones—had already been authorized by the Colorado River Storage Project Act in 1956. If Colorado had a need for more water, and a place where a new project might actually make sense, it was on the eastern plains, where both the growing cities of the Front Range and the farms atop the Ogallala aquifer were facing water famine thirty or forty years down the road. One of the Bureau’s most successful projects, Colorado-Big Thompson, was already delivering Colorado River water across the Continental Divide through a tunnel to the East Slope; the power produced by the steep drop down the Front Range was enough to justify the expense of the tunnel, and the additional water diverted from the upper Colorado to tributaries of the Platte River was welcomed by everyone from canoeists to whooping cranes to irrigators in Colorado and Nebraska. There was no reason why another such transbasin diversion project couldn’t be built. No reason, that is, except Wayne Aspinall. The eastern plains were in someone else’s district.

During an interview in 1979, Felix Sparks, who selected the five projects at Aspinall’s behest, conceded as much. “Twenty years ago, we already saw urbanization as inevitable,” Sparks said. “So I looked around for a place where we could keep a viable agricultural industry going.
We didn’t want
to let cities and industry have the water. We picked those projects on the basis that it would be impossible, physically impossible, for Denver to get its hands on that water.” It was an extraordinary admission. All that Sparks failed to mention was the fact that he was likely to benefit personally from new projects on the West Slope. Though a modestly paid public servant, Sparks was a fairly wealthy man, the result of some shrewd and highly secretive business investments across the Front Range. He was widely rumored to own a large interest in a food-processing plant on the West Slope—a plant that could use a fresh supply of locally grown fruit nurtured on taxpayer-subsidized water. Of course, Felix Sparks, like a lot of western farmers, didn’t believe in such a thing as federally subsidized water. “This business of federal Reclamation subsidizing irrigation water,” he snorted, “is absolute, utter, unmitigated crap.”

Subsidy, however, was exactly what Aspinall and Sparks’s five projects would require, subsidy on a scale that made even the Bureau cringe. It fell to Dan Dreyfus, the Bureau’s house magician, to invent enough benefits to make them pass muster. “Those projects were pure trash,” said Dreyfus in an unusually candid interview in 1981, as he prepared to retire from public service. “I knew they were trash, and Dominy knew they were trash. The way they got into the bill was, Aspinall called up Udall one day and said, ‘No Central Arizona Project will ever get by me unless my five projects get authorized, too.’ When Udall passed the word on to us, we were appalled. The Office of Management and Budget had just bounced Animas-La Plata. Now we had to give it back to them and make them reverse themselves. I had to fly all the way out to Denver and jerk around the benefit-cost numbers to make the thing look sound.

“As a last resort,” Dreyfus continued with a grim smile, “Dominy and I went to see Aspinall and tried to talk him out of it. Dominy said, ‘Look, Congressman, these projects won’t work as irrigation projects. We can’t afford to pump water from the reservoirs to the irrigable lands because we haven’t got any surplus power in the river, and the alternative is to follow the land contours with canals that are going to be ungodly long and expensive. They’ll cost so much you might run into some real problems getting appropriations for these things.’ What Dominy suggested was to build the dams and forget the rest. He said, ‘What you really want is to capture your entitlement. The dams alone will do that. California will never see that water, and you’ll cut the cost in half.’

“Dominy could be the most persuasive man I ever met,” Dreyfus said, “but Aspinall wouldn’t budge. He liked to think of himself as almighty principled, so he got huffy and said, ‘The Reclamation program knows no such thing as a project without beneficiaries. The answer is no.’ ”

Those kinds of principles usually end up costing the taxpayers a lot of money, but in this case they may have cost Aspinall his projects. Why would California’s and Arizona’s Congressional delegations, which outnumbered Colorado’s ten to one, vote for appropriations for five projects which would mean surrendering water their own constituents were using? Since the projects made so little sense, and were so expensive, the rest of Congress might follow their lead. Aspinall, however, had already succumbed to the twin delusions that affect so many committee chairmen—that he would be reelected forever, and that he would live nearly that long. As long as he sat in his committee chair, he could deny California and Arizona whatever he pleased unless they voted in favor of his projects. It was a reasonable argument, until he was bumped out of office four years later by a virtually unknown law professor named Alan Merson—a candidate who had campaigned heavily on the environmental principles that Aspinall often scorned. By 1987, only the Dolores Project was close to being finished—it alone would end up costing $450 million, and the water promised to be so expensive that the farmers were anxiously trying to back out of their contracts. “We were dumb and greedy,” said one Junior Hollen. “If they force us to buy the water now, it will bankrupt us.”

Meanwhile, twelve years and more than $2 billion after the passage of the Colorado River Basin Project Act, the Central Arizona Project was nearly built too. It would be a Dolores Project on a far, far grander scale.

A political mirage for three generations of Arizonans, the Central Arizona Project is now a palpable mirage, as incongruous a spectacle as any on earth: a man-made river flowing uphill in a place of almost no rain. To see it there in late 1985, just being filled, induces a kind of shock, like one’s first sight of Mount McKinley or the Great Wall. But it is an illusion that works both ways. Up close, the Granite Reef Aqueduct seems almost too huge to be real. Where will all the water come from? From the air, however, the aqueduct and the river it diverts are reduced to insignificance by the landscape through which they flow—a desert that seems too vast for the most heroic pretensions of mankind. The water the aqueduct is capable of delivering is more than Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago consume together. Pour it on Arizona, however, and it would cover each acre with two hundredths of an inch. In the summer, when the temperature reaches 135 degrees at ground level, that much water would evaporate before you had a chance to blink.

To build something so vast—an aqueduct that may stretch eventually to 333 miles, pumps that will lift the water 1,249 feet, four or five receiving reservoirs to hold the water when it arrives—at a cost that may ultimately reach $3 billion, perhaps even more, would seem to demand two prerequisites: that there be a demand for all the water, and that it be available in the first place. In Arizona, all of this has been an article of blind faith for more than half a century. Build the CAP, and the aqueduct will be forever filled because of Arizona’s Compact entitlement; fill the aqueduct, and the water will be put to immediate use—that is what every politician who ever aspired to sainthood in Arizona has said. But there are a number of reasons why this will not be the case—perhaps not remotely the case. If anything, the Central Arizona Project may make the state’s water crisis
worse
than ever before.

When the Colorado River Basin Storage Act was bottled up in the House Interior Committee in the mid-1960s, it wasn’t just the Sierra Club and the Grand Canyon dams that were responsible. The dams, it was feared, might drag the bill down to defeat on the floor of Congress, but it had to get out of committee first, and the bill’s major hurdle there—a hurdle that seemed about fifty feet high—was California. California had five members on the committee and a powerful ally in John Saylor, the senior Republican committee member, who was from Pennsylvania. Saylor was as antagonistic toward the Bureau of Reclamation as anyone in Congress; he especially loved to pick a fight with Floyd Dominy; and he was unalterably opposed to the CAP. He was so valued in office by California that tens of thousands of dollars poured into his campaign coffers from that state to keep him there.