BOARD01706

• Board Meeting Date: 8/2/1961
• Description: Table of Contents, Agenda and Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

2449

I

have 51.75% of the sale of the energy, of the
surplus. And I made a long, hard fight as Governor
of Colorado on that matter. I was joined in that
fight by Wayne Aspinall. A compromise was finally
reached after almost two years of bickering and
instead of giving us 51.75% they gave us 46%.
That was the compromise that we accepted and the
bill was enacted. The bill would not have been
enacted had they not given us that much of a
percentage, a good, big percentage, for the build-
ing of our particpating projects.

My interest from the very beginning in the
bills that were introduced in the Senate and in
the arguments tha t we had about the amount of
revenue that would be available to participating
projects in the Upper Basin, and my interest as
of today and as of this hour and it has been
constantly from the beginning and will continue
to the end, is in the building of the participat-
ing projects. I am not particularly interested
in a battle about the power - private power or
public power. I have a long record in the Con-
gress as of supporting the REA and of supporting
the consumer position of a preference. For the
first time I am just a little bit shaky about
that preference user's right. I think it's cost-
ing our participating projects a lot of money
but nevertheless that's the law now and I sup-
ported it when it was before the Congress.

I

A responsibility facing me I presume, as the
Colorado Commissioner of the upper Colorado River
Commission, is that the Congress will look to
that Commission for a recommendation. Inasmuch
as I anticipated that question coming before our
Commission, I have made an all-out effort to try
to understand this whole controversy. I have
tried to find out all the facts, and there were
many conflicts as Felix Sparks has pointed out.
We go back to that old saying that figures don't
lie but liars figure and I don't mean it that
way; I mean that those who figure have come up
with different results. I made a trip to Salt
Lake City specifically to discuss this whole
problem with Ival Goslin and his staff and I spent
an entire afternoon in Salt Lake discussing it