BOARD00444

• Board Meeting Date: 1/11/1961
• Description: Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

.G.GO~

for, and in the formative development of, the
Colorado-Big Thompson Project until I was suc-
ceeded by a younger man which was probably a
good idea.

Now we began hearing, at Greeley, about
the Narrows Project in 1911 when John Warren
and 'Big Mac', as he was called, D. H. McClen-
ahan, and others, were promoting it as a means
of conserving flood water to irrigate a large
area of the South Platte Valley. When it was
being urged, at the time I was advisor to the
Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District,
there was so much opposition arose from Ft.
Morgan and the Morgan County area that my
advise to our board was to take no position on
it; that we had enough to do to run our own
Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District,
particularly at a time when we were still need-
ing appropriations to complete our project.

I

I never got over the idea that the project
and the proposal was a good one and that it
would add a great deal to the wealth of the
State of Colorado and to its propulation by
firming up the water rights of the lower South
Platte and by enabling the bringing of a large
additional area, not in Weld County, but in
Morgan and Phillips and Sedgwick Counties,
under irrigation and under the higher produc-
tion that can come from irrigation and the
resulting, of course, of benefit to the state
in more wealth, more assessed value and more
population. Because we notice that the dry
land counties are shrinking in population.
The irrigated counties are gaining or holding
their own but the shrink is where there is no
irrigation.

I haven't seen this brochure. All I saw
about the proposal today was an entry in the
Greeley Tribune from Mr. Miller, and I don't
have any authority to speak for anybody except
myself as an allotment payer on several allot-
ments in the Northern Colorado Water Conser-
vancy District and one who is interested in
increasing the population and the assessed

I