For the first time in many years a new dimension has been added to the public debate on diversion of Colorado River water into Central Arizona: the Secretary of the Interior last September announced that his Department was investigating alternatives to hydropower production at Bridge Canyon and Marble Canyon dams. "Alternatives" can mean only fossil fuel or nuclear power plants of one type or another, to produce revenues to finance the water supply phase of the proposed project. Such an investigation could open a Pandora's box of controversies.
The 89th Congress adjourned without acting on the Colorado River Basin Project Bill. Its main 6 ingredients were: (1) authorization for the Central Arizona aqueduct; (2) authorization for the highly controversial Bridge and Marble Canyon dams; (3) a fund of power revenues from Bridge, Marble, Hoover, Davis, and Parker dams to subsidize the Central Arizona aqueduct and any projects later authorized for importing water into the Colorado River; (4) provision for the Central Arizona Project to bear all risks of shortage until a minimum of 2.5 million acre-feet per year is imported into the Colorado Basin; and (5) the creation of a National Water Commission to study the nation's water problems and especially to oversee a study of water importation into the Colorado to be carried out by the Secretary of the Interior.
The states of the Southwest united in their support of importing water into the Colorado Basin. Northern California and the Snake-Columbia system were the possible exporting regions. (The North American Water and Power Alliance, a water diversion scheme on a continental scale, is still mentioned, but the political and economic uncertainties connected with it appear sufficiently great to preclude its serious consideration in the foreseeable future.) The states of the Pacific Northwest united in opposition to hurried plans for exporting their water, insisting first on careful inventories of the water resources of the Northwest, projections of future water use, and the creation of a National Water Commission among whose duties would be studies of alternative ways of meeting demands for water in the Southwest.
The debates in and out of Congress bearing on the provisions of this bill were among the most extended and acrimonious in the history of water-related legislation. Four major issues and several important underlying factors were involved in the controversy: (1) the conservation of unique natural scenic beauty; (2) the traditional Bureau of Reclamation policy of subsidizing irrigation from power revenues; (3) proper economic analysis of alternative power supplies; (4) the inter-basin transfer of water.
A version of this article appeared in print in the January 1967 issue of Resources magazine.
