Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [188]
“The hardest part for me was getting the regional commissioners to go along,” Dreyfus would recall in his Senate office in 1981. “Dominy had them all so scared that when I told them what we were up to, they wanted to crawl in a hole. ‘Oh, no, Floyd’s got to be here!’ ‘You know what Floyd would think of this.’ ‘Floyd will shit a brick.’ One regional director was so terrified I had to fly out to Phoenix to put some fiber in his backbone. The solution itself was kind of clumsy, but it was simple. We decided to buy a share of the Navajo Powerplant in northern Arizona. For the first time, the Bureau was going to own something it always hated—a piece of a great big smoke-belching coal-fired powerplant. It didn’t solve a damn thing except that it gave us the power to pump water to central Arizona. The fact is we were licked. The conservationists and the press and ultimately the public licked the Bureau of Reclamation, and the last person in the world to admit it was Dominy. He wouldn’t admit it, but I can’t believe he didn’t know what was coming. By the time he took off to go overseas he was fighting a rearguard action, and he knew it. Maybe being out of the country was a way for him to save his honor. When he returned, I was the one who had to go see him with a copy of the agreement we’d worked out. I thought he was going to go through the roof, but Dominy always had a way of catching you off guard. His reaction was complete and total lack of interest. He already knew all about it. He just said, ‘I don’t even want to hear about it,’ and told me to get the hell out of his office. He didn’t even look up from what he was reading on his desk.”
Like the westbound wagons that had to jettison furniture, food, even water in order to plow through the desert sands, the Central Arizona Project was finally light enough to move. The Colorado River Basin Project Act was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson on September 30, 1968—the most expensive single authorization in history. Besides the CAP, it authorized Hooker Dam in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico, the aqueduct from Lake Mead to Las Vegas, the Dixie Project in Utah, and the Uintah Unit of the Central Utah Project—the first piece of a water-diversion scheme that promised to be nearly as grandiose as the CAP. It also authorized the San Miguel, Dallas Creek, West Divide, Dolores, and Animas La Plata projects in Colorado, and it authorized a Lower Colorado Development Fund, still penniless, to build an augmentation project that hadn’t yet been defined, let alone approved. Almost unnoticed alongside everything else, the bill made deliverance of Mexico’s 1.5 million acre-feet of water—of tolerably sweet water—a national responsibility, whatever that meant. Loosely interpreted, it might mean a pipeline from Lake Superior to Mexicali.
The five Colorado projects—which could easily add a cool $1 billion to the cost of everything else—were an object lesson in the workings of the Congressional pork barrel. They were put into the bill at the insistence of Wayne Aspinall, the black-eyed former schoolteacher with a testy principal’s disposition who had climbed from a little western Colorado town to become the chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. Aspinall distrusted urban, expansionist California with all the recondite loathing of a small-town mind, and he didn’t trust Arizona much more. The overallocated river ran right under the window of his expensive home on Aspinall Drive in Palisade, Colorado, and he figured that Colorado had better extract every drop of its rightful share or California and Arizona would take it and never give it back. If the CAP was to