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Show 72 WAR FOR THE COLORADO RIVER but it cannot create a supply of water for diversions under those rights." Retained by the state of Colorado, Hill had stated California's case against the crsp as precisely as it had been stated by the engineers of the Colorado River Board of California. The Eighty-second Congress had approved a small development in Colorado called the Collbran Project. It embodied an unusual plan, in that a special pro- gram for financing it had been contrived. Known as the Collbran Formula, it was similar in many respects to the interest-component method, but differed in some of its major provisions. Rep. Saylor of Pennsylvania said of the legislation: "We were very careful to say that, while we used a new and distinct formula to make the Collbran Project feasible, it should not be considered as a change in basic policy or be seized upon or used by anyone as the authority for its application to any other project.81 "Strange as it may seem, since that time the Bureau of Reclamation has grabbed upon the Collbran Formula and modified it, and we now have it thrown back in our face in the Colorado River Storage Project." The so-called "modified Collbran Formula," which the Reclamation Bureau had invented, called for the payment of interest until a loan for power units of a project had been liquidated. The scheme looked good but it was deceptive. The Basin Fund plan destroyed all benefit that might have been derived from it, and in the end, whether the Collbran Formula or the interest- component method was used, the losses to the taxpayers would be virtually the same. The fog concealing the |