BOARD00226

• Board Meeting Date: 4/1/1970
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Memos
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

I

I

excess of $40 million charged, one way or an-
other, to the upper Basin Fund. If these
deficiencie~ continue to be assessed against
us then it is likely thst the amount of revenue
which the Upper Basin Fund has been deprived of
will exceed $100 million. This was never con-
templated when the Storage Project Act was
passed by Congress in 1956. No one ever contem-
plated the diversion of $100 million or so of
Upper Basin funds as a pure bribe to the Lower
Basin. We are willing to pay a reasonable
ransom but not $100 million.

The tragedy is that the Upper Basin cannot
develop its water resources if this money is
drained away from the Upper Basin Fund. The
situation that the State of Colorado finds it-
self in today is that we will have no money in
the Upper Basin Fund in the decade 1970 to 1980.
Translated into simple terms, this means that
we cannot get authorization for any more Colo-
rado projects for which repayment would have to
start during the periOd 1970-1980. That is a
direct result of this diversion of funds to the
Lower Basin. When we go to Congress with an-
other authorization and the Secretary says there
are no funds available to Colorado for the
authorization, the state of Colorado has no
recourse except to go into the united States
Supreme Court to determine why diversions are
being made from the upper Basin Fund for the
benefit of Lower Basin power contractors. I
think in that effort we will be joined by the
other three states of the Upper Basin.

As to the consequences, we must prepare
ourselves for the eventuality that this might
end in the Supreme Court."

MR. KROEGBlh

"Political pressure, you think, won't
accomplish this in the Congress or the Senate?"

MR. SPARI<S I

"We will exhaust those means first. We hope
that we will be successful at that level."