Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [206]
On April 18, Carter announced his final, unalterable decision on the projects. It was obvious to anyone that the administration had tried to steer around states from where powerful committee chairmen came; nonetheless, it couldn’t help crashing into some formidable egos and interest groups along the way. There were three projects in Colorado—Dolores, Fruitland Mesa, and Savery-Pot Hook—which was home to the second-largest Congressional delegation in the West and a Democratic governor, Dick Lamm, who hadn’t hesitated to attack Carter before. The Dayton, Plainsville, and Yatesville projects were all in Kentucky, a swing state in an election year. There were Cache Basin in Arkansas, Grove Lake in Kansas, The Harbor Project and the Bayou Boeuf, Chene, and Black Channel were both in Louisiana, Russell Long notwithstanding. There was Dickey-Lincoln in Maine; Merremac Park in Missouri; Lukfata Lake in Oklahoma—peanuts as such projects go, but irresistible because the only real beneficiary of a $39 million investment would be a private catfish farm. And then, to make the whole effort financially worthwhile, there were five immense projects, none of them worth less than $500 million, two of them likely to end up costing six or seven times that much, all conceived by the Bureau of Reclamation: Garrison in North Dakota; Oahe in South Dakota; Auburn Dam in California; the Central Utah Project; and then—one could almost sense the administration crunching the bullet between its teeth—the most expensive project the West had ever seen, the rival of Tennessee-Tombigbee itself, the Central Arizona Project. Carter said he wanted all of the projects terminated. Not just unfunded—terminated.
As Carter had by then come to expect, the decibel level was highest from within his own party. Republicans, of course, stood up for their own threatened projects, but the Minority Leader in the House, Congressman Robert Michel of Illinois, said privately—and sometimes not so privately—that he thought the hit list was a pretty good idea. It was the Democratic leadership, their values and spending habits unchanged since the New Deal, that gave Carter fits. In a lectern-thumping floor speech, Jim Wright said that Carter was carrying his environmental ideas so far he threatened to become “a laughingstock.” Then, to show that he, too, was an environmentalist, Wright help up a glass of water to extol its goodness. Public Works Committee chairman Ray Roberts said Carter was a captive of “environmental extremists and budget hackers.” House Speaker Tip O’Neill took the highly unusual (and, for Carter, embarrassing) step of arranging a meeting with the New York Times to complain that Carter was “not listening” to Congress. Senators Gary Hart and Floyd Haskell of Colorado began to pepper the administration with Freedom of Information Act requests, ostensibly to learn how their projects were selected. (“They implied that we were practicing some kind of secret skulduggery,” a Carter staff member complained bitterly later on. “The skulduggery was when the Bureau justified those dams, not when we reevaluated them.”) Even Mondale began undermining Carter’s effort—whether he knew it or not—by going around the country privately assuring Democrats that it was all a phase, that Carter meant well, of course, but that he was certainly subject to reason.
On June 13, the House Appropriations Committee, studded with Democrats, reported out its own version of the 1978 Public Works Appropriations bill. If Carter had hoped it would heed his request and delete the eighteen projects, he was mistaken. The committee bill represented not only outright but vindictive defiance of his wishes. Only one of the projects he wanted to abandon—Grove Lake in Kansas, which lacked firm support even in the district where it was to be built—was omitted. Everything else was generously funded, some with minor conditions attached (Auburn Dam wouldn’t receive more money until there was a better idea whether or not an earthquake would destroy it). On top of that, money was