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By Root 1683 0

good he didn’t believe it himself. “The cost of such Colorado River supply,” he wrote, “is to be paid out of the first power revenues. The remaining power revenues would be available for assisting in the payment of the main program or project, and water revenues would pay part of the cost.” Apparently, Jensen was promised by Udall and Dominy that the power revenues generated by the dams that would be part of the import scheme were going to subsidize the price of water before they even began to pay back the cost of the facilities! Before the dams were paid for; before the aqueducts were paid for; before the tunnels were paid for; before the siphons and canals were paid for—before a penny went to all of that, the power revenues were going to go directly into the pockets of water consumers in southern and central California and Arizona, subsidizing the price of their water. How else could Udall be promising the Southwest water—water that probably wouldn’t be available until the 1980s—at 1935 prices? If this was what it took to get the Central Arizona Project built—and Jensen, a leading foe of that project, did not say an unkind word about it in his memorandum—Udall and Dominy were just about prepared to give the water away.

In an economic sense, what the backers of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan were proposing was unprecedented. It violated every principle of economics, even the fast and loose principles of Reclamation economics. If the lion’s share of the power revenues were going to subsidize not only irrigation but municipal water costs—municipal water whose revenues had usually subsidized irrigation in the past—the project could not possibly be paid back for hundreds of years, if ever. The cost, which had to be in the many billions, would simply be borne on the backs of the taxpayers. From a national perspective, it was a stunningly ill-conceived idea; but from a regional perspective, it was a wonderful idea—an offer none of the basin states could refuse. At a price guaranteed to be affordable—not only affordable but dirt-cheap—the yield of the Colorado River would be increased by one-half. Oregon would get a slew of new irrigation projects, as would Nevada. California’s irrigators would be relieved of their most desperate worry, the self-inflicted groundwater overdraft. And it could all be accomplished by taking a mere 10 percent of the flow of the Columbia River and turning it southward.

Behind the proposal was a dramatic gamble—that Congress and the public would go along with the idea; or, even if they didn’t, that the Southwest had the political power to persuade them to. But how could one sell the public on a program that was supposed to remain a tightly guarded secret? On December 31,1964, two weeks after learning of the Columbia plan, Joe Jensen sent his New Year’s greeting to Stewart Udall, expressing “very great appreciation” for Udall’s decision to support the project that had always been Jensen’s dream. Then he added, “Since your program is to be kept confidential there is little that we can do except give you assurance of our support and our desire to assist in every way.” It must have been frustrating for Jensen. The Metropolitan Water District had the mightiest propaganda apparatus in the entire West, and he didn’t dare push the button to fire it up.

Maintaining a self-enforced silence about the proposal was actually the least of the proponents’ problems. By 1965, the war in Vietnam was consuming an ever-larger bite of the federal budget, and LBJ’s antipoverty programs also promised to cost a tremendous amount. No price had been put on the Columbia diversion, but the Trinity River version of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan was expected to cost $3,126,000,000; going as far as the Columbia for much more water could easily cost three times that much. The federal budget in 1965 was only $118.4 billion; to persuade the Congress to authorize perhaps $10 billion for a single water project would take some doing. But the biggest and most unyielding obstacle would not even be the enormous cost. It would be the