Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [126]
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