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Show LAST LEGISLATIVE FIGHT 277 Committee - Engle, Poulson and Yorty - for defeating the project.403 He also struck a blow at "California propagandists," whom he accused of "poisoning the public mind." However, the project was not dead, merely sidetracked, and he promised that justice for Arizona would prevail in the end. Embittered by the way things were going, and, despite his display of bravado, not a little alarmed by the political situation, the crafty Straus conceived a scheme by which he thought he might aid McFarland and Murdock, or more properly all the Arizona Demo- crats in the coming elections. (Hayden's term had not expired, thus he was not up for reelection.) Straus induced Secretary of the Interior Chapman to grant Arizona the right-of-way across the public domain to build the Granite Reef Aqueduct, the great main pipeline of the Central Arizona Project. It would be 241 miles long, running from the Colorado River to the project area on the Phoenix plateau. Arizona, Chapman announced, could build the aqueduct itself if it wanted to, and he gave the Arizona Interstate Stream Com- mission permission to carry on the construction on fed- erally-owned lands. One of the first men to condemn Chapman's action in Congress was the veteran Democrat, Rep. Sheppard, who declared that the Secretary "was clearly and fla- grantly going against the wishes of the Congress, and he knows it. I am thoroughly shocked that Secretary Chapman would even remotely attempt a movement of this character with the Congress in adjournment." 404 Senator McFarland had been unable to "sell" his water scheme to Congress, said the Los Angeles Times, and Chapman had "tried to help him with this crude |
