OCR Text |
Show __7__ County, 4; Pima and Graham Counties, 2 each, and from each of the other 10 counties, 1 member. With the exception of one member who was elevated to the Legislature, and was of necessity replaced, the membership has been intact from the inception of the commission. They have held 30 meetings, some of them continuing for days, and conducted 16 full days of hearings in 13 communities, situated mostly in the critical water shortage areas of the state. They employed the best experts they could find to make both technical and economic studies. In their hearings they received, and tape-recorded, testimony from 230 witnesses; the hearings were attended by more than 1,000 vitally interested persons. Testimony of the witnesses who appeared before the commission fills 71 hours of tape recordings, on which are carefully preserved the words of all those who asked to give their views to the commission. To obtain these views, and to give the public generally every opportunity to be heard on this vital question, the commission traveled 1,300 miles to communities within Arizona. To illustrate the care which was exercised, the commission held three full days of hearings in Pinal County, where the first critical groundwater area was declared under the 1948 Underground Water Code. Fifty-five Pinal County residents were heard-18 in Coolidge, 21 in Eloy, and 16 in Casa Grande, and their spoken words fill 14 hours of tape recordings. |