OCR Text |
Show Chapter 3 Unity in Planning AS CONGRESS HAS SOUGHT over the years to meet critical needs for water development in the United States, it has adopted special policies to meet the requirements of particular problems of special regions or groups. Thus, the Reclama- tion Act of 1902 was intended to aid irrigation in the Western States, and the Flood Control Act of 1928 was directed at flood control in the alluvial valley of the Mississippi River. These, of course, were essentially single-pur- pose devices. Most of the legislation under which Federal agencies first became active in water resources development took shape when the concept of multiple-purpose development of entire basins was largely unknown and untried. As the possibilities of multiple use of rivers and projects came to be recognized, the special-pur- pose agencies were directed to take multiple- purpose possibilities into consideration in their planning. But this legislation is still directed primarily at facilitating and implementing de- velopment for the special purposes for which the respective agencies are responsible. As a result, river basin planning today is based on a series of largely unrelated congressional acts. This means a fragmented approach to soil con- servation, forestry, flood control, irrigation, navi- gation, or pollution abatement. Under these conditions, any effort to plan the development of a river basin on a unified multiple-purpose basis must go forward under a multiplicity of authori- zations and appropriations. These separate authorizations, however, tend inevitably to overlap. This has been quite strik- ingly the case in the Central Valley of California. They have to overlap because there are fewer and fewer projects that can be conceived as single-purpose projects. Both engineering effec- tiveness and economic justification are enforcing the multiple-purpose idea. Realization of the almost universal importance of electric energy likewise is making multiple-purpose construction essential. Not only that: the separate agencies are in- creasingly concerned with the same river basin, particularly in the Western States. Authoriza- tions, while remaining single-purpose in name, are becoming in fact multiple-purpose. But the blunt truth is that instead of getting coordinated plans, we stumble along amid a multiplicity of separate plans by Federal, State, and local agen- cies that finally are thrown together in an unsatis- factory fashion. We have as yet developed little understanding of the vital need of interdependent thought and action. Again and again, projects are undertaken as if they were ends in them- selves, instead of parts of a program designed to> meet the needs of the land and of our people. The separate approach gives rise, inevitably, to increasing confusion. It encourages efforts by each of the major construction agencies to become the dominant factor in the new multiple- purpose programs. Operating under essentially single-purpose laws which offer divergent con- ditions to the beneficiaries of projects (as on the Rio Grande, or in the Central Valley), sucbi competition for projects and programs results in uncritical planning. This must be corrected. 43 |