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Show THE WESTERN WEB 77 the river into a canal running into central Arizona. A charge of only 2.7 mills per kilowatt hour would be made for that power, and no interest would be charged on the federal money which built the third of the power dam A charge of four to five mills would be charged for the other two-thirds of the power which would be sold on the market, and an interest charge of three per cent would be made on it. The California consumers who would be expected to buy the power would have to pay interest. The Arizona farmers who benefitted from the power would pay no interest. Speaking of the high cost of reclaiming the Arizona land, Downey stated: "All over the United States there are hundreds of millions of acres that could be made just as productive as this Phoenix land at the expendi- ture of two or three or four hundred dollars an acre. . . I think we could do nothing to bring the whole recla- mation system into greater disrepute than to throw open the Treasury on a proposition to bail Arizona lands out, at a tremendous cost, several times the values involved." The project plan proposed to give the whole benefit of interest to irrigation, and an extraordinarily long period of amortization was set up for the irrigation end of the project, Downey said, and expressed the opinion: "It would not be fair, and it would result in controversy and chaos among the reclamation states, if we should endeavor to give such benefits to certain projects, and not to all projects and all states." California had concluded, but the first hearing on S. 1175 was by no means ended. Under the rules of Senate procedure, McFarland had another chance to present rebuttal testimony. He began it by calling on Ralph I. Meeker,47 a Phoenix irrigation engineer. |