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comprehensive water policy, which came two or three years later. I thought I would tell you about how that process worked because I realize there are people in this room, this was in 1977, who were 10 or 12 at the time. I know there are others here who suffered through it, particularly these gentlemen from the Bureau who were put in a very difficult time. Let me give you some perspective. To prepare for this, I spent some time talking to Cecil Andrus and Dan Beard and a number of other people who were involved, including Stuart Eisenstat, who was the president's Domestic Policy Advisor. When he stops his government service, Stu will, I think, write the definitive history of the Carter Administration. He's already started and water policy is going to be a big part of it. Let me give you the broad overview. Carter, as governor of Georgia, had gained a pretty deep-seated distrust of the Army Corps of Engineers, and a deeply seated judgment that many of the projects that the Corps was undertaking - he was obviously looking at the southeastern United States - were environmen- tally destructive, too costly, and not solving the problems they were advertised to solve. By the time he took office, Carter had assembled a list of between 25 and 30 projects. And that "hit list" was an- nounced, literally within a few weeks, at the very beginning of his presidency. You can imagine the reaction and if you were there, you know what happened. It was particularly difficult in the West because, at that time, virtually every governor in the West was a Democrat. It's a little hard to believe now, but the governors in most Western states were Democrats. This was really regarded as a betrayal of the tradi- tional way of doing business on federal water projects. Cecil Andrus, who was coming to the administration from being governor of Idaho, and a couple of other cabinet members, in a somewhat less forceful way, strongly urged the President not to do what he did. They saw the flaws of the projects, they weren't against the idea of going after them, but thought that the announcement would wind up being counterproductive. Certainly, from a political point of view, it did turn out to be much more politically than the administration could shoulder. Over the long term, however, it probably worked out well, but the simple fact was, there was probably no way to head Carter off on this, he was simply going to do it. He had one Cabinet session in which he basically banged heads and said, "This is where we're going." And they salured and they went out and released the list. I hasten to point out, I was not yet on duty at that time. I was still happily serving as commissioner of natural resources in Alaska. I came down right after that announcement, a masterpiece of good timing, and my portfolio was to handle the water projects. There were a number of Colorado River projects in that 30 project challenge, including the CAP, the CUP, Animas LaPlata, Savory Pothook, Fruitland Mesa and others. One way or another, all of these had a relationship with the Colorado. The announcement was that these projects were not going to be sup- ported in the President's budget, and the implication was that some of them would never be supported. Others might be supported later if significant changes were made in the projects. Others might be sup- ported later if the economics of them were improved or safety features added or they were scaled down. There weren't many details in the initial announce- ment, however. Of course, the West came com- pletely unglued. It was an unbelievably contentious time. The first charge that was made against the President, Secretary Andrus and the Corps of Engineers, was that there was no justification for this, that there was no "beef" to the challenges. There was some merit to this charge in the sense that the announcement was made early enough that there wasn't a big catalog of information and analysis that supported the challenges. It was a gathered package of facts and beliefs and analysis, but it wasn't as strong as it should have been. At that point, Carter decided to answer this [criticism] by chartering something called the Water Project Review. It was a review of all of the challenged projects on a much more detailed basis and it had staffs in both my office and the Office of the Assis- tant Secretary of the Army for the Corps. The staffs included John Leshy and Dan Beard, who later became commissioner of Reclamation, Bob Lane, who became the Director of Lands in Arizona, a number of really talented people. Ultimately, some projects were taken off the list following that analysis. THE CHANGING ROLE OF TH E SECRETARY ON TH E COLORADO RIVER It's impossible to deal with the Colorado River during the Carter Administration , Jimmy Carter's project I I challenges, better I ! known in the West I I I I I I I I I I I I I SYMPOSIUM PROC~EDINGS SEPTEMtER 1999 without putting it into the context of as "the hit list." - Guy Martin ~ I