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Show DOLLARS INTO DUST 247 The Colorado River Association of California immedi- ately returned the fire in the form of a booklet enumer- ating twenty reasons for opposing the project. Presented to every member of the House, the reasons were: I. The Upper Colorado River Project would bring 580,000 acres of new land into production while at the same time Congress is being asked to ap- prove legislation which would remove more than forty million acres from production. This does not make sense! II. The Project would saddle an enormous new tax burden of more than $4,000,000,000 on the na- tion's taxpayers. The four states benefitting would pay less than two percent of this added tax burden. III. The Bill proposes that the cost of the power fea- tures of the Project be repaid in one hundred years. With cheap nuclear power just around the corner these gigantic hydro-electric dams would be obsolete by the time they were built. IV. There is no power shortage in the Upper Colorado River Basin. When increased industry creates a need for more power, steam plants can be built to supply it at a much cheaper cost than the proposed hydro-electric plants. The largest coal reserves in the world are located in the Upper Basin states. V. A 1955 survey shows that in nineteen Midwestern and Southern States there are nearly twenty-one million acres of land now lying idle in farms. This is all first class agricultural land and could be brought into production at a fraction of the cost of the Upper Colorado River Project. VI. The Project would cost the nation's taxpayers $5,000 an acre to put water on land to grow more surplus crops, already the nation's biggest head- ache. VII. Secretary of Agriculture Benson said in Kansas City, Missouri: "This is not the time to place a big new block of land in production." |
