Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [182]
It was actually the upper Colorado Basin states, not the lower, that were pursuing the water importation idea with particularly feverish interest. California wasn’t worried. The Imperial Valley had so much water it was almost drowning in it, and Los Angeles had more on the way from the State Water Project, then just being built. Through the CAP, Arizona might soon receive most of its entitlement to the river through a single diversion. The upper-basin projects, however, were small and spread all over the map, and few of those authorized by the Colorado River Storage Project had yet been built. Several, in fact, had been denied startup funds in Congress—partly because their backers lacked the awesome Appropriations Committee clout of the California delegation or a Carl Hayden, partly because they were beginning to be regarded by some members of Congress as a scandalous waste of taxpayers’ money, especially with a war going on. Floyd Dominy had told Joe Jensen that he always got funds for projects that had been authorized, but the upper basin was learning that, indeed, this was not always the case. At the languid rate its projects were being built, the upper basin would be the last to develop its full entitlement to the river. And when the overappropriated river was played out, the compact might not mean a thing. Whoever was using the most water would end up keeping the most water; the various Congressional delegations—especially the powerful one from California—would see to that. No one was going to turn off the spigot to Los Angeles, Arizona, or the Imperial Valley for the sake of a few marginal irrigation projects in the upper basin—especially if they hadn’t even been built.
Exactly how adamant the upper basin was on this issue became apparent, for the first time, at a secret summit meeting attended by representatives of the four states at Denver, Colorado, on January 18 and 19, 1966. The subject of the meeting was the CAP legislation that Dominy, Udall, and the Arizona and California delegates had coalesced behind, HR 4671. HR 4671 was a drastically trimmed-down version of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan. It authorized only the Central Arizona Project, Bridge Canyon Dam (Marble Gorge, the other Grand Canyon dam, had been dropped because its more meager power output didn’t seem worth the inevitable fight), and a new aqueduct to Las Vegas. The bill also authorized something called a “development fund”—a receptacle for revenues from the power dams that, in the future, would help finance the augmentation scheme everyone knew would be needed. The legislation, in other words, authorized the projects that would ensure the Colorado River’s early exhaustion; it also authorized the means of financing the basin’s rescue. What it did not authorize—what it didn’t even mention, let alone describe—was the importation plan itself. Udall and Dominy had evidently concluded that the development fund would be enough to mollify the upper basin. Only after Dominy’s regional director in Salt Lake City, Dave Crandall, sent him his report on the Denver meeting did they see how utterly wrong they were.
Of the four upper-basin states, the one that seemed most intent on a specific authorization for the rescue project was Colorado, within whose borders half the river’s flow originates. This, from Udall and Dominy’s point of view, was most unfortunate. Colorado’s delegation was headed by Felix Sparks, the head of its Water Conservation Board. Sparks had won the Medal of Honor in World War II, among many other medals, for single-handedly storming a machine-gun nest with a sidearm and a jacketful of grenades and killing half a platoon of Germans. According to those who knew him, he was not afraid of God, man, or the devil. He was also stubborn, vindictive, and a bully, but in Colorado, where water was concerned, he was king.
According to Dave Crandall, Sparks had terrorized the Colorado delegation into asserting that “a feasibility study of import must be a part of the [CAP] bill, otherwise they would not support it. They would prefer an authorization