Excerpt
FEDERAL water agencies are going, going, but they are hardly gone. In fact, if Congress can agree on a water projects bill this year that President Ronald Reagan will not veto, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation will enjoy a respite from their downward slide over the past decade.
For the long haul, however, the Corps' survival seems more assured than the bureau's. The bureau not only has run out of major new dams to build, it also is having to deal with an unexpected new dilemma—polluted agricultural drainage—an irony that could end up crippling the agency, along with sizeable chunks of irrigated farmland in the arid West if the problem is not resolved.
Notwithstanding the caveats of Robert Broadbent, who resigned as assistant Interior secretary for water and science in March, this is the picture that emerged in recent interviews with Broadbent; assistant Army secretary for civil works Robert Dawson; Congressman George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the Interior and Insular Affairs subcommittee on water and power; and other Capitol Hill and federal agency figures.
Over the past 10 years, the construction budget of …
Footnotes
Lawrence Mosher is the editor of “The Water Reporter,” 1730 M Street, N.W., Suite 1100, Washington, D.C. 20036.
- Copyright 1986 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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