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<br />8 <br /> <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br /> <br />Interior Task Force and Working Group members accompanied them on the trip, as did some <br />Committee of Fourteen members. Upon his return, Working Group Chairman Sam Eaton <br />announced that he and the Special Representative had been very impressed by the promise of <br />desalting. <br /> <br />OMB representatives on the Working Group, unaware of Kissinger's order but alarmed at the <br />growing support for a desalting plant, contended that the plant was an unnecessarily costly <br />solution that conflicted with the President's water pollution control policy, that it was based on <br />technology unproven on a large scale, and that it would have unknown environmental effects. <br />The environmental concerns were shared by EPA, CEQ and the Corps of Engineers. OST was <br />also troubled by the technical feasibility of such a large plant. Then Agriculture's. <br />representatives suggested that the Department's experimental on-farm irrigation management <br />programs, which it ran in cooperation with Reclamation, might be used on Well ton-Mohawk <br />farms to improve irrigation efficiency and thus reduce the volume of return flows. Less <br />drainage would mean a smaller, less costly desalting plant. <br /> <br />As a result of these discussions in early October, OMB was asked to chair the Working Group's <br />Subgroup on Irrigation Efficiency, to report on the feasibility of reducing salt loading and return <br />flow volume through improved on-farm water management. With the assistance of scientists <br />from ARS's National Salinity Laboratory in Riverside; Reclamation's Engineering and Research <br />Center in Denver, EPA, and OST, the Subgroup put together a three-stage program. Its goal <br />was to raise on-farm irrigation efficiency (the ratio of the volume of water consumptively used <br />on a farm to that applied to the land) from about 54 percent to 80 percent in ten years. At 80 <br />percent efficiency, the volume of return flows from the project would be reduced from 220,000 <br />acre-feet to an estimated 95,000 acre-feet. <br /> <br />Combined with interim substitution for bypassed return flows, the irrigation efficiency program <br />would have allowed the U.S. to defer investing in a desalting plant or other supplemental <br />measures, until at least 1983. By that time, the Subgroup noted, desalting technology would be <br />further refined, and weather modification, or other means of augmenting the Basin's water <br />supplies, might be available. The size of a desalting plant or augmentation project would be less <br />than half that necessary in 1972. <br /> <br />The Subgroup presented its report to Brownell and the Task Force in mid-November. Its <br />ten-year goal of 80 percent efficiency was pronounced impossible by skeptical Interior <br />Department members and representatives of the Wellton-Mohawk District.20 Brownell was <br />nonetheless impressed by its promise-and its low cost. When he issued his tentative <br />recommendations at the end of November, he included Stage I of the program-improvement <br />in overall project efficiency to 63 percent, using existing irrigation technology. The Subgroup's <br />full program-reliance on improving irrigation efficiency until the mid-1980s, at which time <br />another decision on technical means would be required-did not strike him as meeting the <br />definition of a "permanent" solution. His central recommendation was that the U.S. commit <br />immediately to building a desalting plant. <br /> <br />The Special Representative presented his recommendations to the Task Force and the Committee <br />of Fourteen on November 28, 1972, and asked for agency views from Task Force members. <br />