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Show THE IDES OF MARCH 123 12-The biggest participating project proposed in the bill is the most infeasible of all. - This is the so-called Central Utah Project (initial phase) which would cost $127 million for irrigation alone and irrigate but 160,000 acres at a cost of $794 per acre. The water users could repay only $94 per acre over a period of seventy years, or twelve percent of the cost. 13 - Invasion of Dinosaur National Monument. - The bill would break eighty years of conservation policy by invading the Dinosaur National Monument in order to build Echo Park Dam. Echo Park Dam is so expensive that the cost of power generated there equals or exceeds its market value. 14 -The recommendations of the Bureau of the Budget for the drastic revision of the bill were largely ignored. 15-The project is not self-liquidating, as claimed by the Reclamation Bureau. Plain arithmetic shows that it would not be. Simple interest alone, even at 2 V2 per cent, on $1 billion of original investment is $24 million per year. Total net revenues, as estimated by the Bureau, would average less than this amount. As the project could not pay simple interest on the investments, its revenues could never retire the capital cost. The nation's taxpayers would have to do that. Once more Senator Watkins and his colleagues were worried. They still wanted to wait until the House passed the crsp project bill before taking any action in the Senate, but now the danged House Rules Committee was sitting on HR. 4449. Their fervent pleas to the Rules Committee had been respectfully received, but no explanation was forthcoming. What was the matter? No one could answer the question with certainty, but the friendly and persuasive Bill Lyons had picked up a bit of interesting intelligence in his wanderings about the House offices. He delivered it to Terrell. "The Rules Committee is not going to let the bill out in this session," said Lyons. |
