Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [179]
“Mr. Dominy,” Jensen continued, “explained that a group in Denver had been working for thirty days on a preliminary study to bring water from the Columbia River, and that by March he should be able to give a definite answer as to the route and the general features of the project; as well as a comparison of cost of this project and the cost of delivering water from California and desalting.... Washington may need a stepped-up reclamation program,” Jensen quoted Dominy as saying, “in order to offset the adverse effects of closing down several federal installations in that state.”
“The Secretary stated two courses appeared to be possible at the present time,” Jensen wrote his fellow board members. “(1) Have a study made and defer action on authorization while the study is done right; (2) Introduce a bill which would authorize the import program, Bridge and Marble Canyon Dams, Central Arizona Project, and a few of the other projects. By March more definite information should be available and it should be possible to have the Committee report a bill to authorize the study and authorize the construction of the import program.... Dominy indicated the first six months of any presidential term was the best time to hit Congress. He stated that the Bureau had never had any trouble getting funds once a project had been authorized, but it frequently had trouble getting projects authorized” (emphasis added).
Udall and Dominy, in other words, wanted to study the feasibility of the Columbia diversion after it was already authorized, on the assumption that even if it wasn’t economically sound, it would be too late to stop it. Their real concern seemed to be lining up the political firepower that would let them succeed. And the plan, as Jensen described it, included so many gifts to so many states that it certainly ought to succeed. It contemplated numerous new irrigation projects in both Oregon and Nevada, some more projects in the upper Colorado Basin, and the stepped-up reclamation program in Washington that would make up for the mysterious “facilities” that might have to be shut down. Even then, Jensen said, “up to 7.5 million acre-feet of [Columbia River] water” would still reach Lake Mead every year. The plan, then, had to be far more expensive and ambitious than anything ever contemplated—more so, by far, than the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, more so even than the Klamath Diversion studied by the Bureau twelve years earlier. That was remarkable enough. What was really remarkable, however, was that the water would be available “at the present price of Colorado River water.”
To charge no more for Colorado River water delivered to Los Angeles or Arizona than was being charged for water from nearby Hoover Dam would be a feat as astonishing as Moses’ bifurcation of the Red Sea. The water would have to come a thousand miles by aqueduct; Hoover water came only a couple of hundred miles, and the immense power output of the dam subsidized the big pump lift to L.A. Hoover Dam was financed with Depression-era interest rates and built by workers earning $4 a day; this project would be financed by Vietnam-era interest rates and built by unionized labor earning at least $6 an hour. There would be little, if any, hydroelectric power produced, but a lot of power might be required for pumping; the water had to go over or through two major mountain ranges! The difference in cost, per acre-foot, ought to be at least 800 percent, probably much more. But, according to Joe Jensen, Stewart Udall was offering it at the same price the MWD paid for water from Lake Mead. Somewhere, there was an immense subsidizing engine, but where?
In his memorandum, Jensen merely hinted at an answer; it may have sounded so