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FE DERAl AND STATE ISSUES One other point that's rather obscure - but worth mentioning because it is a piece of history that underlies Delph Carpenter's fear about the federal government swallowing up water throughout the West - is at the time the Compact was drafted in 1922, the secretary of the Interior had already been given very broad authority by Congress to build reclamation projects without further authority from Congress. The fear of the federal government at the time was focused on the secretary of the Interior because the secretary didn't need congressional authority to build projects. Most of the early reclamation projects built in the first 25 years of the reclamation program were not authorized by Congress - they were authorized by the secretary of the Interior pursuant to the authority given to the secretary by Congress in the 1902 Reclamation Act. It wasn't until several years after the Compact that Congress basically withdrew that power from the secretary and said, "We the Congress will now authorize reclama- tion projects in the future." That made the projects much more susceptible to an open political process than they would have been had the secretary retained the unilateral power to build projects. That's a bit of Reclamation history that affects how we should look at the Compact as it was drafted and how it's been implemented. Finally, the other thing the Compact _ John Leshy did not address specifically was the whole subject of federal police power, federal regulatory power. Out of that has come concerns about water quality, including the Salinity Control Act, which had an international focus initially, the Clean Water Act, which places certain limitations on water use in the basin, and most important, the Endangered Species Act, which has already been talked about to some extent. I would add to that list the Grand Canyon Protection Act, which also is as an exercise of federal police power that affects water use throughout the basin. Obviously the Endangered Species Act is a subject of major concern affecting use throughout the basin, but the federal government has been successful, as illustrated by the last panel, in forging a number of important partnerships with the states in trying to make that act work with a minimum of disruption throughout the basin, knock on wood. Finally, the other thing the Compact did not address specifically was the whole subject of federal police power. SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS MAY 1997 o WAYNE COOK, ExECUTIVE DIRECTOR, UPPER COLORADO RIvER COMMISSION I'm going to take a little bit different perspective [and] cover a little bit of the history of what happened after the Compact was signed in the Upper Basin. The first couple of decades after the turn of the century found the Upper Basin very sparsely popu- lated, mostly rural, and it was interesting in my research to find that in 1900 the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin roughly had the same populations - just over 100,000 people each. By 1920 the populations had both grown, but the distribution was not substantially different. The population in the Upper Basin was about a quarter of a million, and it was about the same in the Lower Basin - the Lower Basin had grown to about 55 percent of the [total] popula- tion. However, by 1939, the Upper Basin had still only grown to less than 300,000 people. We learned this morning that a great deal of development in the Lower Basin hinged on both the Compact and then subsequent federal development and construction of Hoover Dam. But in the Upper Basin, things pretty well stayed the same for a great deal of time. In 1900 there was more agriculture in the Upper Basin than the Lower Basin, and we heard this morning [about] the pioneering effort in the Upper Basin that probably answers that question as to why. When the Compact was signed, there was still more agriculture in the Upper Basin, about 1.5 million acres, than in the Lower Basin, which was at that time perhaps less than 1 million acres. But by 1940, the agriculture development in the two basins were about equal. If you take a look at the depletions along that same kind of a time frame, in 1900 the depletions in the Upper Basin were around 1 million acre-feet. By 1922 they had grown to about 2.2 million acre-feet. By 1949, they were still only at 2.5 million acre-feet, and by 1965 had only grown to about 2.8 million acre-feet. The Upper Basin states began to develop quite early because of the pioneering efforts and then had some stagnation during a long period of time after the Compact. We talked about slow growth, and I think that defines slow growth. The interesting thing is, we've heard a little bit about Lower Basin irrigation shortages at the turn of the century. In the Upper Basin that really didn't occur until the 1930s - 1934 saw the smallest water supply on the Colorado River to date, even as we know it. Most of those ag developments in the Upper Basin went through very significant shortages during the '30s, and there was a hue and cry then for reservoirs. Some were already in place, mostly