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By Root 1434 0

$700. “Let us compare that cost with the average cost in the Tennessee Valley of $166 per kilowatt of capacity. At Bonneville, the average cost was only $115. At Hoover, the cost was only $112. At Grand Coulee, the cost was only $90.... [I]t is extraordinary that an administration which has declared public power to be creeping socialism, which has put the lid on additional dams on the Columbia, should go up into the mountains of Colorado and there locate public power projects where the cost will be three, four, or five times what they would be at these other locations.... I am not saying that the administration wishes to have this project fail. But I will say that if the administration had wished to discredit the public power system, it could not have proceeded in any better fashion than it has done in this instance.” And he couldn’t help noticing, said Douglas sarcastically, that certain Senators who opposed public power in the Tennessee Valley and the Columbia Basin had suddenly emerged as great champions of public power when it was to come from cash register dams in the mountains of Colorado.

The power features, however, were, as Douglas knew, not the worst aspect of the storage project, but the best. The worst, by far, was the irrigation. “The original projects,” he lectured his colleagues, “tended to be at low altitudes and in fertile soil, and to involve low costs.... Now we are being asked to irrigate land in the uplands, at altitudes between five thousand and seven thousand feet, where the growing season is short and the chief products will be hay, corn, livestock, and alfalfa.... There exists an interesting tendency for Senators in those States to congregate on the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and the Committee on Appropriations, which consider irrigation and reclamation bills. There is a sort of affinity, just as sugar draws flies.” For the benefit of his colleagues and the Bureau, whose economists had labored mightily to put the CRSP in the best possible light, Douglas had sat down and figured out the per-acre costs of the various projects himself. The Silt River Project in Colorado, for example, would cost $674 per acre; the Paonia project, $873 per acre; the Central Utah Project, the most expensive of the lot, $1,757. If one calculated interest, Paonia would go up to $2,135 per acre, Central Utah to $3,953 per acre. These were the mid-1950s, when land prices in the West were still dirt-cheap. Most of the land whose conversion to irrigation would cost thousands of dollars an acre was not worth more than $50 per acre, and that, in many cases, was being generous. “In my state of Illinois,” Douglas pointed out, “the price of the most fertile natural land in the world is now between $600 and $700 per acre. In the largest project of all, the Central Utah Project, the cost would be nearly $4,000 an acre—six times the cost of the most fertile land in the world.”

If an investment of $2,000 an acre could create reclaimed land worth $2,000 an acre, that would be one thing. But even after being supplied with irrigation water, the upper-basin lands would be worth nowhere near that. “What is to be grown on the land?” asked Douglas. “Of the sixteen projects reported, eight of them were stated as being suitable for livestock only, through the raising of alfalfa and pasture. Seven were stated as being primarily for livestock, but with some fruit and vegetable production ... 95 percent of the projects contemplate the production of alfalfa or grain or are directly or indirectly for the feeding of cattle. As a consequence, this land, after irrigation, will not be worth very much, probably not more than from $100 to $150 per acre—$150 per acre at the outside. Yet we are being asked to make an average expenditure of $2,000 an acre on land which, when the projects are finished, will sell for only $150 per acre.”

Douglas’s western colleagues, of course, had no answer to this; his math was correct, his reasoning impeccable. All they could do was stand the rhetoric of their nineteenth-century predecessors on its head;