BOARD00962

• Board Meeting Date: 11/10/1953
• Description: Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

274

projects to each individual project and each
unit thereof. This is not in keeping with
proven business practices. We might c;i te ex-
amples such as the retail grocery business;
such a business could not exist if a fixed per-
centage of profit had to be included in the
markup of the goods sold. It is common practice
to adjust the margin of profit many times between
several items and in some cases some items are
actually sold at a price below cost. But, the
overall operations of the business shows a profit
to the store.. In the case of the Upper Colorado
River Storage project, as originally presented
by the Bureau of Reclamation, water of the Gun-
nison river is at present over appropriated.
No further development can take place without
storage of water on the Gunnison river.

I

POWER COSTS. We do not believe the comparison
of power costs at Curecanti with that of steam
thermo generation is a fair comparison_as the
wholesale cost of power in Delta and Montrose
and Gunnison is over 12 mills. And a recent
survey, by a prominent engineering firm of
Chicago, Illinois, on a 22,500 K.W steam plant
constructed at the mouth of a coal mine on a
non-profit basis, provides for a minimum aver-
age cost of 10.38 mills per k.w.h. Therefore, a
comparison of 10 mills per k.w.h. cost for Cure-
canti power against 9 mills for steam power is not
.an' accurate comparison.

COLORADO'S SHARE OF WATER. The Western Slope of
Colorado contributes over seventy percent of the
water that makes up the Colorado river and is en-
titled (by Compactl to consumptively use 51.75
percent of the total amount of water allocated to
the upper basin states. Without storage and river
regulation the people of Colorado cannot use this
water. Curecanti reservoirs will allow the use of
765,000 acre-feet annually, and the only way Colo-
rado can make use of the water allocated to it is
to retain it before it flows out of the State.
Colorado's share of the river is lost to Colorado
after it flows out of the State. What benefit to
Colorado is water stored in Utah and Arizona? What
reason is there for compacts? Is it our sole re-
sponsibility to provide water for California? Do
we not have a responsibility to our own people?

I

The greatest deposits of lead, zinc, silver in the
United States and many minerals in smaller quantities
such.as copper, gold, tungsten, manganese and others
are located a few miles south of the Gunnison river
in the San Juan Range. Sulphur, gilsonite, gipson
vermiculite and many other non-metallic minerals
abound in the Gunnison river