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~....::::;~ , . . ground water return is from areas below the Narrows Reservoir and will continue whether Narrows is built or not. Only an adequate ground water storage program in the area below Narrows will save for qolorado the water which escapes in the winter. The SouthlPlatte River Study will no doubt address this problem and lit is perfectly obvious that Narrows can in no way meet the problem because it arises in an area gravitionally below Narrows from water over which Narrows has no control. . . .' Without specifying the area actually to be served by the reservoir, the promoters of Nijrrows have said that it would serve 287,000 acres of landito be irrigated. Under current circumstances, this land should be explicitly .speci- fied because transmountain diversion water, the alluvial pumping system and the impossibilities of exchange have made actual specificity necessary to see whether the project will really serve land w~ich iS,not being served. The fact that no subcontracts with even one acre of land to be irri- gated out of Narrows has yet been]signed indicates that the 287,000 acres is pie in the s~y. . ., -. Before a private entrepreneur would spend a 163,000,000 1978 dollars on an enterprise such as the Narrows, that entrepreneur would certainly know where the water supply was coming from and where the buyers were who would pay for the project with the water supply. In view of the uncertainty of water supply forN~rrows, considering seepage, evaporation and a very late decree and dependent on the uncertainty of floods from time t~ time, there is no question that private capital would not unQertake the project. Yet, if Congress funds this project, it will be taking, through taxes, private money to build a public project which will not stand up to the standards of good business management. Another area which needs to ~e updated as to effective- ness of ~arrows Reservoir is floOd control. The Bureau of Reclamation has said that the construction of flood control dams above Denver has not! ameliorated the flood hazard the Bureau found at NarrowS. Yet, the actual obser- vation by those in RLG indicates that most of the major damage from floods. in the vicinity below the Narrows Reservoir is from water of Bijou Creek which enters the South Platte River just below Narrows and above the Town of Fort Morgan. Below this there are no major tri~utaries downstream to Balzac where a river gauging stat~on has been maintained for many years. -12j"