Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [189]
The problem was that by 1968, there wasn’t a single irrigation project left on the West Slope of the Rockies that was economically feasible. The best ones—or, to put it more accurately, the least senseless ones—had already been authorized by the Colorado River Storage Project Act in 1956. If Colorado had a need for more water, and a place where a new project might actually make sense, it was on the eastern plains, where both the growing cities of the Front Range and the farms atop the Ogallala aquifer were facing water famine thirty or forty years down the road. One of the Bureau’s most successful projects, Colorado-Big Thompson, was already delivering Colorado River water across the Continental Divide through a tunnel to the East Slope; the power produced by the steep drop down the Front Range was enough to justify the expense of the tunnel, and the additional water diverted from the upper Colorado to tributaries of the Platte River was welcomed by everyone from canoeists to whooping cranes to irrigators in Colorado and Nebraska. There was no reason why another such transbasin diversion project couldn’t be built. No reason, that is, except Wayne Aspinall. The eastern plains were in someone else’s district.
During an interview in 1979, Felix Sparks, who selected the five projects at Aspinall’s behest, conceded as much. “Twenty years ago, we already saw urbanization as inevitable,” Sparks said. “So I looked around for a place where we could keep a viable agricultural industry going. We didn’t want to let cities and industry have the water. We picked those projects on the basis that it would be impossible, physically impossible, for Denver to get its hands on that water.” It was an extraordinary admission. All that Sparks failed to mention was the fact that he was likely to benefit personally from new projects on the West Slope. Though a modestly paid public servant, Sparks was a fairly wealthy man, the result of some shrewd and highly secretive business investments across the Front Range. He was widely rumored to own a large interest in a food-processing plant on the West Slope—a plant that could use a fresh supply of locally grown fruit nurtured on taxpayer-subsidized water. Of course, Felix Sparks, like a lot of western farmers, didn’t believe in such a thing as federally subsidized water. “This business of federal Reclamation subsidizing irrigation water,” he snorted, “is absolute, utter, unmitigated crap.”
Subsidy, however, was exactly what Aspinall and Sparks’s five projects would require, subsidy on a scale that made even the Bureau cringe. It fell to Dan Dreyfus, the Bureau’s house magician, to invent enough benefits to make them pass muster. “Those projects were pure trash,” said Dreyfus in an unusually candid interview in 1981, as he prepared to retire from public service. “I knew they were trash, and Dominy knew they were trash. The way they got into the bill was, Aspinall called up Udall one day and said, ‘No Central Arizona Project will ever get by me unless my five projects get authorized, too.’ When Udall passed the word on to us, we were appalled. The Office of Management and Budget had just bounced Animas-La Plata. Now we had to give it back to them and make them reverse themselves. I had to fly all the way out to Denver and jerk around the benefit-cost numbers to make the thing look sound.
“As a last resort,” Dreyfus continued with a grim smile, “Dominy and I went to see Aspinall and tried to talk him out of it. Dominy said, ‘Look, Congressman, these projects won’t work as irrigation projects. We can’t afford to pump water from the reservoirs to the irrigable lands because we haven’t got any surplus power in the river, and the alternative is to follow the land contours with canals that are going to be ungodly long and expensive. They’ll cost so much you might run into some real problems getting appropriations for these things.’ What Dominy suggested was to build the dams and forget the rest. He said, ‘What