Cadillac Desert (37 page)

And no wonder! What Pafford was proposing was, if not illegal, then at the ragged margin of the law. Where did the Reclamation Act permit the Bureau to sell deeply subsidized water to a state on an “interim” basis, when the state would turn right around and resell it to some of the largest corporate farmers in the world? Where did it allow the Bureau to promise to match any price offered by the Corps
before it even knew what the cost of developing the water would be?

The answer was, nowhere. But the Bureau was willing to sell subsidized water from one of its dams to California, which would turn around and resell it, at bargain “surplus” rates, to thirty- and forty-thousand-acre farmers who had the economic muscle to drive the Bureau’s chief clients and dependents—the state’s smaller farmers—out of business. And it was willing to do this, to play with federal law and forsake its small-farmer constituency, simply because its archrival might snatch away a damsite it wanted for itself.

Nineteen years later, Robert Pafford, then retired, never saw a bit of irony in this position. During an interview in 1983, he down-played the rivalry between the Bureau and the Corps—“we had our points of contention, but it was nothing serious”—and said that he “didn’t blame Bill Warne for playing both ends against the middle.” After all, he said, “you might have done the same thing yourself.” Warne, whom he referred to as a “great guy,” had “a legal obligation to deliver water to his own constituency—those contracts with the San Joaquin farmers were valid contracts and he couldn’t just ignore them.” But why would the Bureau go out of its way to help a group of giant corporate farmers who might put the Bureau’s little farmers out of business? “Our farmers had water at $3.50 an acre-foot. No way anyone is going to compete with that.” Involuntarily, Pafford admitted what the Bureau has always tried to deny: that its cheap water gives its client farmers an unfair advantage over all the other farmers of the nation.

Two years after the secret 1965 meeting, however, no agreement had been reached on Marysville Dam; evidently, neither federal party would yield (Floyd Dominy, a proud man, privately loathed the Corps of Engineers, and probably refused to go along with Pafford’s recommendation), and each had the power to hang the project up in Congress, which appropriated no money for construction by anyone. By 1966, in fact, Pat Brown and Bill Warne evidently realized that their strategy of pitting the Bureau against the Corps could backfire on them. If the agencies became too competitive, then nothing might get built, just as a pair of rutting elk can lock horns so hopelessly that both of them starve. As a result, that year saw the formation of a new suprabureaucratic entity called the California State-Federal Interagency Group—William E. Warne, chairman—which immediately issued a call for a Herculean amount of water development, most of it on the undammed rivers of the isolated, rainy North Coast. On a big wall map depicting what they wanted to build, one saw, traced in red, a Dos Rios Reservoir and an English Ridge Reservoir and a Sequoia Reservoir and an Etsel Reservoir and a Panther Reservoir and a Frost Reservoir and a Sebow Reservoir and a Mina Reservoir on the Eel—eight reservoirs on three forks of a middle-size river that was nearly dry from June to October. And that wasn’t all. There was a Baseline and a Dinsmore Dam on the Van Duzen. There was a Butler Valley and an Anderson Ford and an enlarged Ruth Reservoir (a smaller one already existed) on the Mad River. Sounding like the Creator himself, Bill Warne, in his introduction to the report, described how the waters had been divided up: “The upper main Eel above the Middle Fork, as shown on attached Chart One, was assigned to the Bureau of Reclamation.... The main Eel between the Middle Fork and the South Fork was assigned to the Corps of Engineers ... the Van Duzen River Basin to the Bureau, the Lower Eel to the Corps....” Nothing was to be built by California itself, though it, of course, would reap the rewards, especially its big growers, who would receive millions of acre-feet of water via long tunnels drilled through the Coast Range. The whole scheme, said Warne in his introductory remarks, represented “a new chapter in California’s illustrious history of water planning.”

But it wouldn’t quite work out that way. In fact, the feuding agencies were about to lock horns and starve over the first two dams on their priority lists.

The North Coast dam that the state and the Corps passionately wanted to build was Dos Rios, a seventy-three-story earthfill wall across the Middle Fork of the Eel that would capture twice as much water as Shasta Lake; it would create one of the biggest reservoirs in the West. The dam the Bureau wanted to build first was English Ridge, which would create a smaller reservoir on the main Eel a short distance away. Since each project required a hard-rock tunnel, about twenty miles long, to shunt the water to where it was allegedly needed, they would both be very expensive. To become economically feasible, a large proportion of their costs would have to be written off to flood control, which is nonreimbursable. The Corps of Engineers has always been vested with the authority to compute the flood-control benefits of federal dams. It was, as expected, quite generous in computing the flood-control benefits of Dos Rios; it was inexplicably niggardly in the case of English Ridge. David Shuster, who would become the operations manager for the Central Valley Project—and who would later be hounded out of the Bureau for being too fair-minded about Jimmy Carter’s water projects “hit list”—would later insist that English Ridge was a perfectly feasible project. “There was nothing wrong with English Ridge,” Shuster remembered. “A lot of the water could have gone to municipalities in the North Bay and to grape growers. Repayment-wise, it was in sound shape. The thing that killed us was the Corps wouldn’t give us the flood-control benefits they gave to Dos Rios. It was like they were using two separate formulae.”

Flood-control benefits for both dams, it would turn out, were largely a fraud. Even huge Dos Rios Dam would have reduced the thirty-five-foot crest of the monstrous 1964 flood by less than a foot—a fact which the Corps took pains to camouflage, but which its enemies, especially a local Dartmouth-educated rancher named Richard Wilson, who led the opposition, managed to bring out and make stick. It was Wilson, and Ronald Reagan—who, as governor, refused to approve the project—who ultimately killed Dos Rios Dam, but it was the infighting between the agencies that set the stage for its defeat—and for the ultimate collapse of the whole carefully orchestrated development push. By 1981, not a single one of the thirteen North Coast dams on the Corps’ and the Bureau’s priority lists had been built. In that year, moreover, all the major North Coast rivers were added to the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers system by the Carter administration—which, in theory, puts them forever off-limits to any dams.

The single cooperative achievement since the Marysville summit meeting a decade and a half earlier was the erection of New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River. There, the Marysville formula was finally tried: the Corps built the dam, the Bureau gets to market the water—if it can. By 1985, seven years after the dam was completed, not a teacup of New Melones water had been sold, which was especially infuriating to those who despaired at watching the last wild stretch of the lower Stanislaus River drowned. One reason no water had been sold was lack of demand, no matter what the Bureau said about demand “being there.” The other reason was that no canals had been built to carry water from the reservoir to the farmers’ fields. Why had they not been built? The conspiracy theorists—who, by now, include a lot of people who have watched the progress of California water politics from the losers’ side—thought they had an answer. As long as New Melones water remains unsold, it simply runs out, in carefully regulated and fully usable flows, to the Delta, where it can be sucked up by the State Water Project’s battery of ten-thousand-horsepower pumps and conveyed either to the big San Joaquin growers or to Los Angeles. It is hard to argue with people who insist that this was the intention all along.

The relatively small yield from behind New Melones Dam, however, is scarcely enough to supply the Chandler family’s Tejon Ranch or to satisfy two years’ worth of subdivision growth in southern California. As a result, the State Water Project seems destined to remain chronically undersupplied, unless Californians do a remarkable about-face and approve $10 billion or $20 billion worth of new water development. The state, the Bureau, and the Corps have all heaped blame on environmentalism and “selfish” northern Californians for the fact that so little has been built, but if anyone was selfish it was the Bureau and the Corps, who coveted too much, and cooperated too little, for their own good. As for Pat Brown and Bill Warne and the California water lobby, they appear to have schemed themselves into a dry hole.

No one will ever know how many ill-conceived water projects were built by the Bureau and the Corps simply because the one agency thought the other would build it first. What is clear, thanks to long-hidden files from the Bureau that have come to light, is that the Corps of Engineers has kept a full-court press on the Bureau since it moved on the Kings and Kern rivers forty years ago. And it was during this period that by far the most objectionable projects were built.

A May 19, 1962, memorandum from Bruce Johnson, the Bureau’s regional director in Billings, Montana, to Floyd Dominy offers a vivid illustration of how far things could go. Johnson’s memo discussed a series of potential conflicts between the Bureau and the Corps in the upper Missouri Basin. One project which the Corps was talking about building at the time was Bowman-Haley, a dam on the Grand River in North Dakota—which is not much of a river, despite its name. “They will build [Bowman-Haley] if they get the money,” Johnson warned Dominy. “I predict the state will see to it that they get the money unless steps are taken to have the Secretary of the Interior [that is, the Bureau] authorized to build it.”

Would it make sense for the Bureau to build it, in that case? “We have reported on Bowman-Haley, always unfavorably, at various times for some thirty years,” Johnson wrote. “... If we take this on we will be building another tributary dam with little to show in the way of repayment contracts. Benefits and repayment are based on a delivery of 3,000 acre-feet per year. However, some years delivery of this amount of water will not be possible.” It was, in short, a perfectly miserable Reclamation project, a project whose yield was not only pitiable, but impossible to guarantee. But it made no better sense, Johnson quickly added, for the Corps to build the dam instead. Flood control was a poor justification; the damsite was so near the river’s headwaters that most of the floods were raised downstream. That left municipal water supply as the sole conceivable justification. But “most of the municipal and industrial [water-supply] benefits,” he continued, “are anticipatory of urban and industrial growth.” And not only was North Dakota the one state in the union that was losing population, but the little town of Haley—the town that would presumably get the water—is so small it wasn’t even listed in the American Automobile Association’s road atlas for 1976. The water might be piped to Bowman, a considerable distance away, but even Bowman, a relative metropolois, had only thirteen hundred people. If the dam were justified on the basis of local water supply, then, it would give Bowman and Haley about two and a half acre-feet per person—twelve times as much water as average per-capita use.

It was difficult to conceive of a more worthless project, but in the 1950s and 1960s projects as dubious as Bowman-Haley had a way of getting built. The agency that ended up building it was, indeed, the Corps of Engineers; authorized by Congress in 1962, Bowman-Haley was finally completed eight years later. Seeing it there, on a piddling river snaking through the drought-bleached rises and swales of western North Dakota, one needn’t be a hydrologist or an engineer to fathom why Bruce Johnson was right. The dam itself is huge: more than a mile across and seventy-nine feet high from the base, it has nearly half the bulk of the smaller of the Corps’s main-stem Missouri dams. The reservoir, by contrast, is tiny and shallow, a puddle as reservoirs go; it holds only 19,780 acre-feet, while the smallest of the main-stem Missouri reservoirs holds ninety times more. A lot of tax money had gone for a thimbleful of water.

The Bureau’s main problem throughout the Missouri Basin, Johnson added in a footnote to his secret memorandum to Dominy, was the indefatigable opportunism of the Corps of Engineers. “They [the Corps] will build projects that we may find unacceptable from a financial standpoint. The states are aware of this.... The Corps will gladly give us their ‘bad’ project proposals on the tributaries but do not intend to refuse Congress if money is appropriated to build either ‘good’ ones or ‘bad’ ones. I do not think they believe that the Memorandum [an informal division of responsibility Johnson and his counterpart in the Corps had recently signed] ends the historic game of the states playing the Army against the Bureau to get what is locally desired.”

It was an incredible admission—although it was obviously not intended as such—since neither the Corps nor the Bureau would assert publicly that
any
federal water project, anywhere, had ever been a waste of tax dollars. As Johnson intimated, however, the ultimate blame for the bad projects had to be laid at the feet of the “local interests,” the contractors and irrigation farmers and patriotic Chamber of Commerce types who haven’t the slightest compunction about wasting the taxpayers’ money on pointless dams. A perfect example was offered by the Bureau’s area engineer in Salem, Oregon, John H. Mangan, who wrote a confidential letter—what the Bureau calls a blue-envelope letter—dated January 22, 1965, to Harold Nelson, the regional director in Boise, recalling a conversation he recently had with a member of the Oregon State Water Resources Board. “He expressed his feeling,” Mangan wrote, “that the Corps of Engineers working through the Public Works Committee did not have the difficulties Reclamation has.... He did not feel that the Public Works Committee was concerned with legislation such as Public Law 9032 of the last Congress relative to reimbursement of recreation and fish and wildlife functions.” Mangan said he told the man that any such environmental protection provisions would likely apply to the Corps as much as to the Bureau. But his derisive response, according to Mangan, was that he should watch what happened during the upcoming Congressional session. “If the Corps is able to secure rapid authorization of a number of projects and the Bureau is having trouble getting their projects authorized by the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, [the man said], ‘perhaps we should have the Corps building all our projects.’ ”