WSPC01369 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

'000413 . . PART TWO . The Agreement in Principle implements a long standing national obligation to develop the water resources of both the , Upper and the Lower Colorado River Basin States. The Agreement in Principle implements a sixty year national obligation to develop the waters of the Colorado River for Indians and non-Indians living both in the Upper and Lower Colorado River Basin States. As early as 1922 Congress recognized that the "control of the floods and development of the resources of the Colorado River are peculiarly national problems" in part because the job was so big that only the federal government could do it. See Fall Davis Report, S. Doc. No. l42, 67 Congo 2d Sess (1922). Out of the. 1922 report emerged the Boulder Canyon Project Act, 45 Stat. l057, which authorized the construction, operation, and maintenance of Hoover Dam to control floods, improve navigation, and regulate the Colorado River. As noted years later in Arizona V. California, 373 U.S. 546, 555 (1963), the development of Hoover Dam in the Lower Basin represented only a portion of Congress' overall plan for putting to beneficial use the waters found throughout the entire reaches of the Colorado River. The prospect of the United States to undertake to build as a national project the necessary works to control floods and store river water for irrigation was apparently a welcome one for the basin States. But it brought to life strong fears in the northern basin States that additional waters made avai!ab1e by the storage and canal projects might be gobbled up in perpetuity by faster growing lower basin areas, particularly California, before the upper States could appropriate what they believe to be their fair share. (emphasis supplied) The Supreme Court confirmed in Arizona V. California, supra, that Congress' numerous enactments for the Colorado River were each expressly designed to overcome the conflicts existing between all of the basin states for development of Colorado River water, both main stem and tributary. Implementing a national plan to overcome the competing interests of the various states was accomplished in part by directing the Secretary of Interior to both construct the projects and to determine, in his sole judgment, which municpal, industrial and agricultural users would receive waters from the federal projects. Indeed the Supceme Court confirmed that the Secretary through his contracts had in fact affected a statutory allocation of the waters of the Lower Basin, because the Lower Basin states themselves had declined to undertake an allocation on their own. 4