Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [214]
With the benefit of hindsight, some of Carter’s own people are scathingly critical of how the administration handled the water-projects issue. Guy Martin, his Assistant Interior Secretary, is one. “He blundered from the word go,” says Martin. “He might as well have gone up to the Hill with a six-pound codfish and slapped it across their faces. Andrus begged him not to come out with a big long hit list, but he did it anyway, and from that point on the merits of the whole issue got lost. It became ‘Congressional prerogative,’ the ‘Imperial Presidency.’ He was his own worst enemy. He had a great big chip on his shoulder about water projects, that was his problem. It made him focus way too much on the environmental issue, when the only way he could win was with the economic one. Most Congressmen don’t really care. about wild rivers. The New Deal mentality is entrenched up there—even the right-wingers believe in it. Carter loved wild rivers, and in the end they thought he was just plain kooky.
“What Carter could have done,” Martin continued, “is pick the three or four worst projects instead of nineteen, or thirty-two—that was another problem, he kept changing the numbers on them—and get rid of them. He could have done it. In war, you don’t take two dozen beachheads on the same day. You can’t, for God’s sake. But he could have won some big ones. Auburn Dam, for instance. If that dam failed, it would be the worst peacetime disaster in American history. He had them there. Garrison and Oahe were awful. The farmers didn’t even want Oahe. The Tug Fork Project is so ridiculous it strains belief. I can’t help believing that if Carter had focused on a few he could have eliminated them. Then he would have had a small victory, but a real one. Then there’s next year.”
Having said all this, Martin added, almost apologetically, “Carter was right, though. The projects are as bad as he said, most of them. The environmental damage is bad. The economics are bad. The politics are bad. The agencies are out of control. If the Corps and the Bureau built everything they wanted to, we’d hardly have any flowing water left. His instincts were good.”
Many western members of Congress, not to mention the water lobby and the bureaucracies, were overjoyed when Ronald Reagan was elected President after Jimmy Carter. Reagan might talk like a fiscal conservative, but surely he wouldn’t be against water development. After all, he was a westerner. He owned a ranch in dry country. His Interior Secretary, James Watt of Colorado, was the environmentalists’ anti-Christ. Most of his other key domestic advisers were westerners, too—James Baker, Ed Meese, William Clark, Paul Laxalt. All of them, and Reagan, too, certainly talked as if they believed in water development.
No sooner had Reagan taken office, however, than his budget director, David Stockman, was talking about recovering 100 percent of the costs of new navigation projects from the beneficiaries—not just the capital costs, but the operating costs, too. (In 1985, the Corps of Engineers spent around $1 billion on project operation and maintenance alone.) There was also talk of forcing states to pay a large share of the costs of flood-control dams—something Carter had never seriously proposed. Even Watt was suggesting that the states should contribute to Reclamation projects—up front. It wasn’t exactly clear how large a share the administration had in mind, but privately Watt was suggesting that 33 percent might be a reasonable amount. Since that would preclude practically all new water development, the water lobby didn’t know quite how to react. Jan van Schilfgaarde, the director of