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00242.\\ . . The Background The early settlers had water for their needs. Small works, public and private, developed as ne eds grew for mining, irrigation, and municipal supply. With rare exceptions, people lived where the water was. Ground water was ample in 1910. So farthaf's the stot'y of"anywherein the West. Then Los Anglees and San Franc isco set the early example of reaching out great distances for greater municipal and industrial supplies. Los Angeles had its Owens River Project, completed in 1913. San Francisco had its Betch Hetchy Project, completed in 1934. Both systems were extended and expanded in later years. Agr icultu ral water development by special districts, author ized by the Legislature in the 1880's, grew steadily. Local development for greater supplies reached a high point with the completion of the C?lorado River Aqueduct in 1941 by Los Angeles and surrounding cities banded together as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Not only were the barriers of distance, mountains, and deserts conquered by this effort. Legal and political barriers fell, too, In these same years the Colorado River Compact involving seven States was negotiated (1922), and the Boulder Canyon Project Act (1928) opened a new era of large scale Federal-State-local cooperation. An active State role in water planning also began in the 1920's with the creation of the Division of Irrigation in the Department of Public Works. In 1930 a "State Water Plan" came out of the new agency. It cons isted primarily of a storage and canal system to move surplus water from the "wet" northern half of the Great Central Valley to the "dry" southern half. In 1933 the Legislature approved this Central Valley Project and authorized issuance of $50 million in bonds to get construction under way. Hard times prevented sale of the bonds. (Today California spends mor e than $10 million annually just on basic data collection and planning for water and related resources.) In 1935 the construction of the Central Valley Project by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was authorized by President Roosevelt as an anti-depres- sion, public works measure. In the next decade State water planners were working closely with Reclamation on CVP, with the U.S. Corps of Engineers on flood control projects and with the Soil Conservation Service on small watershed projects. Cal ifornia' s population and economy swelled dur ing the years of World War II and growth continued into the postwar era. In 1945 the Legislature 2