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054:2 I, among thousands of other people in Colorado, am genuinely and deeply concerned about the preservation of the natural environment. Few states have been more committed to protecting the environment than has Colorado. We were one of the first states to adopt a comprehensive law directing an agency of the state government to appropriate waters of natural streams and lakes for environmental protection. We have supported the inclusion of more than a million acres of Colorado lands into the national wilderness system. We are cooperating with studies directed by the Congress to determine the advisability of including several hundred miles of our streams into the national wild river system. Each of these five projects has been carefully reviewed by state agencies and my staff for environmental concerns. We have successfuly modified aspects of the projects that had detrimental environmental impacts. While not all impacts have been wholly ameliorated, on balance these projects are environmentally sound. In addition to having been declared environmentally unsound, these projects are being challenged on the basis of benefit-cost ratios. At the time these projects were authorized and for some years subsequent, there was no problem with the benefit-cost ratios. But the rules continue to change. The rules were not changed by the people of the project areas, nor for that fact by the Congress either. Anyone can win a numbers game if that anyone has the power to change the rules. At the best, a benefit-cost ratio is only a hypothetical analysis. We do not know of any law in existence which requires that a benefit-cost ratio either bind the Congress or the President to any particular course of action. The fact is that the future value of water cannot be determined by any mathematical formula now in existence. Let me recite an actual case. Thirty years ago, the right to one acre-foot of water under the Colorado-Big Thompson reclamation project could be purchased for about twenty-five dollars. Today, those rights are selling for seven hundred and fifty dollars and upwards -- an incredible increase of about three thousand percent. No benefit-cost ratio ever yet devised would have reflected the change in value of the Colorado-Big Thompson water. We believe that it is the responsibility of Congress to decide what the public values of such projects are. Congress must determine the importance of a stable agricultural economy and its impact on the national economy. Congress must consider how such projects will affect land use patterns and life styles within our rural areas. All of these factors are at least as significant as a hypothetical benefit-cost ratio. In this assessment of benefit-cost ratio, much has been said about the desire of the President to balance the budget. Few seem to realize the deletion of these projects will have little impact upon the Presi- dent's budgetary program. These projects will be paid for by power revenues from the Upper Colorado River Basin Fund, forty-six percent of which is credited to Colorado's account, together with water use charges and ad valorem taxes. I wonder whether the president's advisors realize that about eighty-four percent of the total federal investment in the federal reclamation program is reimbursable to the federal trea- sury. Other billions of dollars have or will be returned to the United States treasury in the form of taxes. The gross value of crops produced by the reclamation program is -5-