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Show 24 WAR FOR THE COLORADO RIVER California congressmen who had been wheelhorses in the fight against the Central Arizona Project - Clair Engle, Norris Poulson and Samuel W. Yorty. The Colorado River Board's chief engineer, Raymond Matthew, expressed the majority feeling of the Board in this way: 22 We in California, as has often been expressed, are fully in favor of the full development of the Colorado River, including developments in the Upper Basin, provided that such developments will be in accordance with the pro- visions of the Colorado River Compact. However, we also feel that the developments authorized and built should be on a sound financial basis. It is implicit in this Upper Basin program that the interest component on power revenues is to be used to repay capital investment and not to be returned to the Federal Treasury as interest for the use of the money. We have consistently opposed this proposal of the Department of the Interior because we be- lieve it is wrong in principle and not in the interests of a sound reclamation program. It boils down to interest-free money for everything, which means that the Federal Treasury and the taxpayers must meet the interest on the funds borrowed, and also borrow additional funds to pay interest as it comes due. This means that the cost to the national taxpayers for interest on such a project runs into the billions during a long repayment period. We find also that for eight of the ten power units in the proposed Upper Basin Storage Project the actual cost of producing power on a fifty-year, three per cent repayment basis would exceed the price at which it is proposed to be sold. This does not look like good engineering or eco- nomics. We believe that developments can be made in the Upper Basin on a sound financial basis and that these uneconomic proposals in the report need not be adopted in order to carry out desired developments. It may be that outright federal subsidies may be required but these should be open subsidies and not hidden, in our opinion. |
