9298

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9298
• Author: Water Education Foundation.
• Title: Colorado River Project
• USFW Year: 1999.
• USFW - Doc Type: Symposium Proceedings.
• Copyright Material: NO

THE
CHANGING
ROLE OF THE
SECRETARY ON
TH E COLORADO
RIVER

apoplexy. Floyd Dominy told him quite calmly that
Grand Canyon National Park had been improved by
Glen Canyon Dam. That before it had been a dirty,
muddy old boulder strewn stream and now look at
that beautiful, clear water - you can see clear to the
bottom of it.
To summarize the role of the river policy in that
particular era, I come to the role of Arizona v.
California. I emphasize in my paper that in 1928,
nobody would have thought that the Boulder
Canyon Project Act meant that the decision about
the allocation of shortages on the river would be the
function of the Secretary of the Interior. The absence
of any standards for the allocation of the shortage is
what promoted Justice Harlan and Justice Douglas,
quite unusually, to join together in dissent. So when
we got the decision
in 1963, the
implementation of
that decision
became the focal
point for the
balance of the
administration.
Well, as all of
you know, it
culminated in 1968
with the Colorado
Storage Project Act
and, in my paper, I
summarize the
main ideas of that
act. The Colorado
River Water Plan as
announced by
Udall in 1963 came
out as the 1968
statute. Whereas Udall had called for the Bridge and
Marble Canyon dams, when the legislation finally
came out, they were off limits. You were to use
thermal power for the Central Arizona Project and
you had the moratorium on the Columbia River.
The final question that Bob asked is, "To what
extent were we governed by any ideology?" I will
agree 100 percent with what he said, that I did not
detect any partisan ideology that I could identify.
There were ideological differences. A major ideologi-
cal difference of the time had to do with the 160-acre
rule. Ray Lyman Wilbur, with his assistant Mike Ely,
had said that when the California projects were taken
over by the federal government, the 160-acre
limitation didn't apply. In 1964, Udall was brave
enough to say Ray Lyman Wilbur had been wrong.
My first act as Under Secretary was to just object
vigorously to that on two grounds. One, I said, if

When you think

about the personnel we

had to deal with ... it

would be presumptuous
on the part of any

Secretary at that time to
take the position that he

SYMPOSIUM
PROCEEDINGS
SEPTEMBER 1999

~

was, in fact, the water

master of the river.

- John Carver

you're going to start to overrule Wilbur, how could
you be sure Udall wouldn't be overruled?
With reference to the nature of the priorities of
Indians and in the connection with the 160-acre
limitation, this deeply ingrained, this ideological idea,
was not held as strongly by the political appointees as
it was held by the lawyers.
The key point that I've tried to make is that the
Secretary presides over a diverse department. During
our time, the Bureau of Reclamation was under very,
very strong leadership. I undertook to try to think
what Floyd Dominy would have said about the role
of the Secretary in that particular period with
reference to the management of the river, and my
version of Floyd's sense would have been this, "Udall
didn't hold the Bureau back too seriously."

Guy MARTIN,

FORMER AsSISTANT SECRETARY OF

INTERIOR, CARTER ADMINISTRATION

I'll make one unsolicited initial remark caused by
the historical discussion about water projects. You
just heard about ones that occurred in the last
century. I want to recommend a book to you. The
name of the book is Fortune is a River. It sounds like
it was written about the Colorado River. In fact, it
wasn't. It was written about a collaborative water
project which took place in the years 1500 to about
1503 and the collaborators for it were two very
skilled gentleman, Machiavelli and Leonardo
da Vinci, on behalf of the city of Florence. The
scheme was to divert the Arno River and cut Pisa off.
At the same time that Leonardo was pursuing a career
as an artist and a military engineer, and Machiavelli
was moving through the Florentine bureaucracy, they
got together on this scheme to divert the Arno. It
probably would have succeeded but for the absence of
enough technological capability, engineering capabil-
ity, to do it. It's a great book and if you want to see
how water issues never really change, you might want
to take a look at that book.
This panel is a small tribute to something that I
learned when I was at Interior and that is, never give
too much power to a regional director of the Bureau
of Reclamation. As soon as he was blessed with the
chairmanship of this panel, Bob Johnson immediately
sent around a letter telling us pretty much how we
were going to organize our speeches and then
shamelessly lobbying his own views in that letter. I'll
do my best Bob, but it is a tough sell in my case.
It's impossible to deal with the Colorado River
during the Carter Administration without putting it
into the context of Jimmy Carter's project challenges,
better known in the West as "the hit list," and his