Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [280]
If one believed the brochure of the Lower South Platte Conservancy District, as many people would be drawn to fetid, shallow, bath-warm Lake Narrows as are drawn to Yellowstone National Park.
Here was a dam that the state engineer said would deliver only a third of the water it promised and could conceivably collapse; a project whose official cost estimate—if what two officials of the Union Pacific had privately suggested was correct—would barely suffice to relocate twenty-six miles of railroad track; a project whose real cost, whatever it turned out to be, would therefore be written off, in substantial measure, to “recreation,” though the water would be unsafe to touch; a project whose prevailing interest rate (crucial to justifying the whole scheme) was one-fifth the rates banks were charging in the late 1970s; a project many of whose beneficiaries owned more land than the law permitted in order to receive subsidized water (even after the acreage limit was stretched to 960 acres in 1982); a project that might, if the state engineer was correct, seep enough water to turn the town of Fort Morgan into a marsh; a project that would pile more debt onto the Bureau’s Missouri Basin Account; a project that would generate not a single kilowatt of hydroelectric power and would be all but worthless for flood control.
And yet, on top of all this, there was to be still another development, one that ought to have finished off the Narrows Project once and for all: Most of the farmers who were supposed to be the beneficiaries said they didn’t want the water.
The farmers, it turned out, were not as ingenuous as the Bureau wished them to be. During the years it had pushed for the Narrows Project, the Bureau had never quoted them a firm price for the water nor guaranteed them a fixed amount. Why, in that case, should they obligate themselves to buy it for the next forty years?
In a letter to the Denver Post, Jacob Korman, the president of the Irrigationists’ Association, Water District Number One—the preexisting water district over which the Lower South Platte Conservancy District was trying to impose itself as a superagency—explained the farmers’ position. “There are fifteen irrigation districts in our association from Kersey near Greeley to Balzac below Brush,” Korman wrote. “If built, the dam would be in the heart of our district. These ditch companies provide irrigation water to 125,000 acres of land. Twelve of these ditch companies representing farmers irrigating 105,350 acres have taken positions opposing the Narrows. One, representing 1,100 acres, has indicated support. At the last report, two, involving 19,100 acres, have taken no position.”
Although many of the ditch companies in his district were initially enthusiastic about the project, Korman said, “those which have been offered specific contracts by the Lower South Platte Conservation District have found these contracts to be unacceptable.” The main reason was that the contracts demanded that the farmers pay for water released at the dam. The Bureau refused to guarantee delivery of the water at the farmers’ headgates—as if to demonstrate that it knew all along that Kuiper’s theory about channel losses was correct. The farmers might be a trusting lot, but they weren’t dumb.
“The office of our state engineer,” Korman concluded, “is the only office ... which has both the data and the technical staff to make a professional assessment as to what the real impact of the Narrows