Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [128]
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.”
And no wonder! What Pafford was proposing was, if not illegal, then at the ragged margin of the law. Where did the Reclamation Act permit the Bureau to sell deeply subsidized water to a state on an “interim” basis, when the state would turn right around and resell it to some of the largest corporate farmers in the world? Where did it allow the Bureau to promise to match any price offered by the Corps before it even knew what the cost of developing the water would be?
The answer was, nowhere. But the Bureau was willing to sell subsidized water from one of its dams to