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Show 50 WAR FOR THE COLORADO RIVER After impounding all the water in the state, Arizona had dug wells until the underground water supply was exhausted. This assertion was soon to be refuted and disproved. Hayden also told the senators at the table, Arizona would show that the government would be reimbursed for all the money it loaned for the Central Arizona Pro- ject. That assertion, too, was soon shown to be without foundation by qualified witnesses. With that brief speech, Hayden rushed off to his appropriation duties, leaving the field in charge of his junior colleague, Senator McFarland. It was McFarland who brought the Colorado River Compact and the Colo- rado River controversy into the formal discussion only a few minutes after the hearing had begun. His opening rendition was the theme song of the Arizona forces: that California was not entitled to more than 4,400,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water, and that neither California nor the Federal Government had had the right to enter into contracts which would give California 5,362,000 acre-feet. McFarland then turned the stage over to William Warne, Assistant Commissioner of Reclamation, an un- qualified advocate of the new Reclamation Bureau pro- gram and the Central Arizona Project. 7 Warne presented the committee with letters regarding the project from various federal departments and state governments. They were in the main noncommittal letters, for there was no complete engineering report on the project, and the departments and governments could hardly comment on something they had not seen. Absence of a final engineering report had not deterred Hayden and McFarland from asking for the hearings, |