Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [281]
That a majority of the farmers for whose benefit Narrows was to be constructed finally decided they would lose more water than they would gain from the dam was fascinating. The “unadjudicated” water of which Korman spoke were those high flows which, after every Colorado farmer had taken his water right and Nebraska had been guaranteed its share, the farmers could skim off for themselves. As of now, no one “owned” these occasional surpluses in the river; anyone could divert them for storage in offstream reservoirs or in the aquifer beneath his farm. But with Narrows Dam in place, all but the most extraordinary high flows—the fifty-year floods—would be captured and they would belong to the Bureau of Reclamation. The Bureau would charge money for them—charge even if it refused to guarantee that the water would ever arrive. The Bureau wasn’t even offering the farmers a pig in a poke; it was offering them a poke without a pig.
In 1982, at the behest of Senator Gary Hart, Woodward-Clyde did yet another study of the Narrows problem—it was now a “problem” as often as it was a “project”—and reversed its earlier conclusions as innocently as if they had never been held. Its estimate of water available for annual delivery was now down from more than eighty thousand acre-feet to thirty-four thousand acre-feet, almost in line with Kuiper’s estimate and fathoms below the Bureau’s. The effects on the sandhill and whooping cranes and other migratory wildlife downstream were now regarded as “moderately negative” instead of insignificant. But the most startling reversal came when the firm recalculated the worthiness of the project in simple economic terms. Using an interest rate of 7½ percent, but retaining the doubtful flood-control benefit of $800,000 a year and a highly optimistic view of the recreational potential, Woodward-Clyde came up with a benefit-cost ratio of only .10 to 1.0—for every dollar invested, ten cents would be returned. Even with an interest rate of 3¾ percent, Narrows was a loser.
Like most water projects, though, Narrows refused to roll over and die. In 1983, Congress, at the urging of local Representative Hank Brown, voted it another $475,000 appropriation. It wasn’t enough to build anything, but it was enough to keep it alive. The latest unofficial cost estimates, in 1984, were in the neighborhood of $500 million. If they are correct, each acre-foot (assuming 34,000 acre-feet is the annual yield) will cost $14,500 to develop. Few Colorado farmers can afford to pay more than $50 an acre-foot for water, and the Bureau has never charged any of its client farmers half that much (most get it for $7.50 or less). The taxpayers, presumably, will make up the difference, buying a couple of hundred farmers about the most expensive water on earth.
And yet, in early 1984, the politicians who had always been for the Narrows were still for it. Senator Gary Hart, a neoliberal, was for it; liberal Congressman Tim Wirth was not against it; Senator Bill Armstrong, a budget-conscious conservative Republican, supported it. But no one was for it as much as Dick Lamm—although Dick Lamm was the one politician honest enough to admit, discreetly, that it wasn’t worth building. Once, at a Denver Broncos football game, Karen Christenson’s sister and her husband found themselves sitting a few seats away from the governor, sporting their big, bright “Stop the Narrows” buttons. Lamm noticed the buttons, came over, and asked who they were. Then, in an odd small burst of candor, the intense young forward-thinking governor delivered himself of a private opinion about the project he had championed so relentlessly. “I know Narrows isn’t the best project in the world. I’d much rather use the money to build up the state’s economy in a more