Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [154]
“That did it,” Dominy chortled. “There was nothing he could do. I got my building. I got my airplane, too. When the GSA chief found out the building was going to be a high-rise, he really squeaked. He sent me three letters of complaint. I didn’t bother to answer one.”
For years, the Dominy Building—a name it has not yet officially received—was the only high-rise anywhere around Denver. You could see it from far across the Platte River, rising significantly behind the thrusting skyline of downtown. Without knowing what it was, you knew it was a monument to something or someone powerful. “I want it functional, dammit!” Dominy barked at his architects. “I want a building like a dam.” What he got is a lot worse. Square as a cinder block, thuddingly banal, it is done in the Megaconglomerate style of the 1960s and 1970s—a J. Edgar Hoover Building without the grotesque semicantilevered overhangs. Despite the cold, the heat, and the feeling of marcescence, Building Fifty-six had a refreshing air of purposefulness, a MASH-like crisis atmosphere. The Dominy Building, by contrast, is fixed, solid, and sealed, as impervious to a rose’s scent as to a typhoon—rather like a dam. When it was finished, thousands of Bureau engineers could leave their climate-controlled suburban homes, climb into their climate-controlled cars, and drive to their climate-controlled, windowless new offices, never once encountering the real world.
It is probably pure coincidence that, at about the same time, the mid-1960s, the Bureau—especially its chief—began losing touch with other types of reality.
In the early days, Floyd Dominy had been something of a crusader, if only because he hated being pushed around by politicians and big farmers. Bureau water was by far the cheapest in the West, sold at a fraction of its free-market worth, and if you could manage to irrigate enough land with it you could not only prosper, you could grow rich. Legally, under the Reclamation Act, you could irrigate 160 acres and no more. “We didn’t even want them to irrigate that much land,” says Dominy. “The law was created to pack as many farmers as possible in a region with limited water. If they could make a living on forty acres, we gave them water for forty. We were talking about subsistence.” However, many farmers in Bureau projects were irrigating 320 acres, the result of a liberal interpretation of the act that permitted joint ownership and irrigation of 320 acres by a man and wife. (Married men, it was discovered, made more reliable farmers than bachelors.) In all but the highest and coldest regions of the West, you could make a good living on 320 acres irrigated by subsidized water. If you were in California and raised two cash crops a year with water that cost a quarter of a cent per ton, you could make more money than a lawyer. In 1958, the Fresno Chamber of Commerce published a brochure whose purpose was to lure more farmers to the Central Valley, and which estimated the number of irrigated acres one had to plant in various crops to support a family. The figure for oranges was twenty to thirty acres; for peaches, thirty to forty acres; for grapes and raisins, forty to fifty acres; for figs, sixty to eighty acres. Even a hundred and twenty acres of cotton and alfalfa, comparatively low-value crops, could support a family if you had Reclamation water.
Rumors abounded, however, of corporate farmers illegally irrigating thousands of acres with the super-subsidized water—by inventing complicated lease-out lease-back arrangements, by controlling excess land through dummy corporations, by leasing from relatives, and so on. It is unclear how much the Bureau knew about this and how exact its knowledge was; what is clear is that it did little or nothing to end it. Even a self-proclaimed populist like Mike Straus was afraid to tangle with the giant California farming corporations