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Show THE WESTERN WEB 51 but Warne was not in the position of a senator, and he took pains to point out that the only report on the pro- ject available was preliminary in nature, and had not been approved by the Secretary of the Interior. Lack of funds, he added, had prevented the desirable investi- gation of the project from being completed. Warne, safeguarding the Reclamation Bureau's flanks, made another important matter clear for the record: the Bureau had neither the prerogative nor the intent to adjudicate controversies between states, nor to inter- pret the various documents from which the California- Arizona conflict had risen. In its preliminary report on the Central Arizona Project, the Bureau had used figures and interpretations furnished it by the state of Arizona. As if he might have feared that he would be accused of being less than forthright, Warne suddenly revealed that the proposed project would not meet the economic requirements of Reclamation Laws. Thus, it became plain that the committee had been called to pass upon a project for which there were no complete engineering, financial or economic reports, a project which did not meet the provisions of present laws, and which required drastic changes in the basic structure of reclamation statutes before it could be built. McFarland was visibly unhappy with Warne's testi- mony, and he jumped in to gain a better light on the record. All the engineering and cost data needed was at hand, he declared, but the other states of the Colorado River Basin had not yet submitted their comments on the project. Wasn't that the real reason, he asked Warne, why the Reclamation Bureau had not prepared a final report? |