9407

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9407
• Author: Water Education Foundation.
• Title: 75th Anniversary Colorado River Compact Symposium Proceedings.
• USFW Year: 1997.
• USFW - Doc Type: \
• Copyright Material: NO

Hoover, Ward Bannister and Secretary Ray Lyman
Wilbur, who had been president of Stanford. Mike
had been a big man on campus in the '20s and Ray
Lyman Wilbur took a shine to him. When President
Hoover appointed Wilbur secretary of the Interior,
Wilbur asked Mike to come out of private practice in
New York and be his special assistant. Mike under-
took the difficult task of implementing the Boulder
Canyon Project Act. He personally negotiated all the
water and power contracts that were the prerequisite
to getting the funding for construction of Hoover
Dam.
Later he became a prominent attorney in
Washington and represented California interests
for many years, was chief counsel for the state of
California in Arizona v. CalifOrnia, and chief counsel
for the Colorado River Board of California for
many years - a long and distinguished career, one of
the old water buffaloes that are passing from the
scene, along with Steve Reynolds and some others.
Mike was very instrumental in California's involve-
menr in Colotado River matters. Unfortunately, from
my perspective, it seemed like over many of those
years California was better at making things not
happen than making things happen. And now we're
faced with finding ways to make things happen on
the Colorado River.
That's some background on Mike Ely. He'll be
sorely missed. His papers are at Stanford if you're
interested in exploring some of these old issues. He
was a close friend of President Hoover, was co-
executor of his estate, and was a trustee of the Hoover
Foundation and Library at Stanford, so there's a great
deal of lore of the Colorado in Mike's papers that
would be a very good source for those of you who
might be doing research.
Mike's death, I think, marks the end of an era on
the Colorado in many ways. It may have been an era
of confrontation and disputation, but I think we're
looking at a new era, and we're trying to come into
that new era looking back 75 years to see what the
states brought to the process in creating the Colorado
River Compact and what they can bring to the
process of going forward in the future.
When I was in Sacramento recently, I saw the
inscription on the old state Supreme Court office
building from Sam Foss' poem, "The Coming
American." Those of you who have been there
know it says, "Bring me men to match my
mountains." The rest of the phrase from Foss'
poem was "Bring me men to match my mountains,
bring me men to match my plains - men with
empires in their purpose and new eras in their
brains." I'm hopeful we're launching into a new era
on the Colorado River.

And now we're going to pick the brains of these
distinguished pane1isrs. We've asked the panelists to
give us a brief review of what [their state] hoped to
gain from the Colorado River Compact and whether
they think they got what they wanted; whether in
light of subsequent developments, particularly the
Supreme Court kind of writing the Colorado River
Compact out of the Boulder Canyon Project Act in
its 1963 decision, Arizona v. CalifOrnia, they still
think they got what they wanted. Finally, if they
were standing in the shoes of their predecessors,
whether they might have done anything differently
75 years ago to deal with the problems we're facing
today.
With that, we may as well start with California
who was the cause of the whole problem back then -
and I guess cause of the problems today.

DAVID KENNEDY, DIRECTOR,

CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF

WATER RESOURCES

This has been a really interesting project to
prepare for. I've been going back and doing a lot of
reading about earlier days and how we gor to where
we are. Jerry mentioned some of the things we read,
but something happened a few weeks ago that I
thought was one of those very unusual things that
helped with this. One of our water commissioners
gave me some information about the Colorado River
Compact. Now he didn't even know I was coming to
this meeting - that's why this was a very unusual
thing to have happen. I happened to see him and he
brought me a very thick volume that was a doctoral
dissertation by Ruhl Leslie Olson, Ph.D., from
Harvard University in 1926, just four years after the
Compact. Evidently he decided to devote his doctoral
work to this particular subject, and then he published
it himself. I found it fascinating to read and look at
what was going on in his mind right after all of this
happened.
The main poinr that one would emphasize from
California's perspective is that we were interested in
development. We were, as best I can tell from reading
the early stuff, not looking at specific acre-feet, per se,
we weren't looking for a specific quantity - we were
trying to get a big dam built on the Colorado River
for three purposes: flood control, particularly with
respect to the Imperial Valley; irrigation with respect
to the Imperial Valley and the Lower Colorado; and
hydroelectric power. These were the three - and in
that priority - purposes driving California's interest.
We'd had in 1905-1906 the disastrous breakout of
the Colorado River into Imperial Valley, creating the
Salton Sea. It was a monumenral event, and there was

STATES'
PERSPECTIVES

SYMPOSIUM
PROCEEDINGS
MAY 1997

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