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By Root 1711 0

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