Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [132]
The Bureau’s main problem throughout the Missouri Basin, Johnson added in a footnote to his secret memorandum to Dominy, was the indefatigable opportunism of the Corps of Engineers. “They [the Corps] will build projects that we may find unacceptable from a financial standpoint. The states are aware of this.... The Corps will gladly give us their ‘bad’ project proposals on the tributaries but do not intend to refuse Congress if money is appropriated to build either ‘good’ ones or ‘bad’ ones. I do not think they believe that the Memorandum [an informal division of responsibility Johnson and his counterpart in the Corps had recently signed] ends the historic game of the states playing the Army against the Bureau to get what is locally desired.”
It was an incredible admission—although it was obviously not intended as such—since neither the Corps nor the Bureau would assert publicly that any federal water project, anywhere, had ever been a waste of tax dollars. As Johnson intimated, however, the ultimate blame for the bad projects had to be laid at the feet of the “local interests,” the contractors and irrigation farmers and patriotic Chamber of Commerce types who haven’t the slightest compunction about wasting the taxpayers’ money on pointless dams. A perfect example was offered by the Bureau’s area engineer in Salem, Oregon, John H. Mangan, who wrote a confidential letter—what the Bureau calls a blue-envelope letter—dated January 22, 1965, to Harold Nelson, the regional director in Boise, recalling a conversation he recently had with a member of the Oregon State Water Resources Board. “He expressed his feeling,” Mangan wrote, “that the Corps of Engineers working through the Public Works Committee did not have the difficulties Reclamation has.... He did not feel that the Public Works Committee was concerned with legislation such as Public Law 9032 of the last Congress relative to reimbursement of recreation and fish and wildlife functions.” Mangan said he told the man that any such environmental protection provisions would likely apply to the Corps as much as to the Bureau. But his derisive response, according to Mangan, was that he should watch what happened during the upcoming Congressional session. “If the Corps is able to secure rapid authorization of a number of projects and the Bureau is having trouble getting their projects authorized by the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, [the man said], ‘perhaps we should have the Corps building all our projects.’ ”
Harold Nelson forwarded Mangan’s letter to Floyd Dominy, adding a postscript of his own. He had just spoken confidentially with the head of a local pressure group organized to support a new Bureau project in eastern Oregon. Nelson’s confidant, a Mr. Courtright, said he was finding considerable sentiment that the group should switch its allegiances and push for rapid authorization by the Corps instead. “Courtright ... stated quite frankly that the argument which they are having the greatest difficulty to counter is the one that authorization through channels available to the Bureau will be much more difficult and time-consuming than through Public Works Committee channels.” Actually, Courtright told Nelson, he knew the real cause of the Bureau’s difficulties. “He attributes [them] to field representatives of the Oregon Water Resources Board and to the Corps of Engineers” itself.
As Harold Nelson intimated, an unholy alliance of local economic interests and a powerful member of Congress was something the Bureau was at pains to resist. In 1967, the Johnson administration, preoccupied with the war in Vietnam and the chronic inflation Johnson’s policy was creating, requested only a minuscule appropriation for Auburn Dam in California. Robert Pafford, the regional director, wrote a memo to Dominy discussing the options the Bureau had. The obvious one was to slow down the construction schedule on the dam itself, but this