Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [88]
A cash register dam was to be a dam with an overriding, if not a single, purpose: to generate electricity for commercial sales. If electricity would bring in many millions of dollars in annual revenues which could be used to subsidize irrigation projects that hadn’t a prayer of paying back the taxpayers’ investment. The dams were an invention spawned by something the Bureau of Reclamation called river-basin “accounting,” which was itself spawned by something it called river-basin “planning.”
River-basin planning, at least, made a certain amount of sense. A river like the Arkansas, which rises in the Colorado Rockies and empties into the Mississippi in an utterly different time zone and topography and climate, invites competing and potentially incompatible uses. Upstream, it is valuable for irrigation; downstream, it is valuable for inland navigation. If the Bureau diverts too much water for upstream irrigation, there won’t be enough water available downstream to justify the Army Corps of Engineers’ efforts to turn the lower river into a freeway for barges—an obsession it has been pursuing on virtually every large river in the country. The dilemma could also work in reverse; if the Corps got a head start on the lower sections of a river, the Bureau could find itself unable to get any upriver projects authorized. The creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority marked the first time a major river system was “viewed whole,” even if the natural river virtually disappeared as a result. The TVA was regarded as such a success by the administration of Franklin Roosevelt that it began to demand, if not more quasi-dictatorial authorities like the TVA, then at least a coordinated plan of development between the Bureau and the Corps. This was river-basin “planning,” and, except for the fact that no one ever spent more than a minute or two thinking about the value of a river in its natural state, it made some degree of sense.
River-basin “accounting” was a horse of a different color, though the Bureau developed a propensity to use “planning” and “accounting” interchangeably. With river-basin accounting, one could take all the revenues generated by projects in any river basin—dams, irrigation projects, navigation and recreation features—and toss them into a common “fund.” The hydroelectric dams might contribute ninety-five cents of every dollar accruing to the fund, while the irrigation features might contribute only a nickel (and cost three times as much to build and operate as the dams), but it wouldn’t matter; as long as revenues came in at a pace that would permit the Reclamation Act’s forty-year repayment schedule to be met, the whole package could be considered economically sound. It was as if a conglomerate purchased a dozen money-losing subsidiaries while operating a highly profitable silver mine—a case of horribly bad management which, nonetheless, still leaves the company barely in the black.
Michael Robinson, the Bureau’s semiofficial historian, exhibits no compunction about admitting any of this in the Bureau’s authorized history, Water for the West:
By the late 1930s, the high cost of projects made it increasingly difficult for Reclamation engineers to meet economic feasibility requirements. In the early 1940s, the Bureau devised the plan of considering an entire river basin as an integrated project. It enabled the agency to derive income from various revenue-producing subfeatures (notably power facilities) to fund other works not economically feasible under Reclamation law.
Thus, by offsetting construction and development costs against pooled revenues the Bureau was able to demonstrate the economic feasibility for the entire, pooled program. In 1942 this method was used for the first time in planning a basinwide development program for the Bighorn River in Wyoming.