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Show 684 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT power and its sale as a byproduct of irrigation projects. Mead maintained that all net revenues from such power, after the return of the cost of the power plant and the appurtenant works, should be credited to the Reclamation Fund, which was seriously declining. He thought his agency might experiment with buying all the surplus land within a project area to prevent speculation and to give it complete control over the selection of settlers.149 Unfortunately, he could not devise a plan by which the privately owned land could be acquired at what he called a nonspeculative price. He also thought the government might experiment with refinancing distressed private irrigation projects with 4 percent loans to put them on a self-supporting basis. Throughout his entire career as Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation Mead tried to meet this problem of the speculator who anticipated the actual farm maker on reclamation projects. After his death, Congress was persuaded to adopt a measure that embodied his hopes. With the approval of President Roosevelt and Secretary Ickes, an act was passed to prevent "speculation in lands in the Columbia Basin pros-pectively Irrigable by Reason of the Construction of the Grand Coulee Dam Project and to aid Actual Settlers in securing such Lands at the Fair Appraised Value thereof as Arid Land. . . ." (1) It provided that no public funds should be expended in irrigating lands in the Columbia Basin until the privately owned and state lands to be irrigated had been appraised without reference to the proposed construction or irrigation and without increment on account of the prospect of construction; (2) that landowners make contracts with irrigation districts for the repayment of their proper share of construction costs which were to be extended over no more than 40 years; (3) that landowners who had more than 40 acres of irrigable land, if single, and 80 acres if married, were to sell the excess at the appraised price and if they did not they were to be denied all water; (4) owners of excess land must sign recordable contracts wherein they agreed to dispose of their land at the appraised price and give a power of attorney to the Secretary of the Interior to sell for them; if land should be sold for a price in excess of the appraisal, 50 percent of the excess should go to the construction fund and for each month thereafter the amount should be increased by one percent until it reached 99 percent. Excess lands already developed with water were to be exempt from the law.150 Two important loopholes were left: an excess-land owner could sell to a relative or business associate who could then resell to a third party for any speculative price, and the irrigation water provided in a district might so build up the ground water level as to make it possible to pump from it and thus avoid the heavy water charge. Through such loopholes the excess-lands provisions in some projects were to be made ineffective. In August 1947, the Reclamation Era carried a major article on the history of land speculation in irrigation projects down to 1924 which is worthy of examination. Land speculation, William E. Warne, Assistant Secretary of the Interior, wrote, had come very close to ruining the government reclamation program in the early days. Speculators had bought the land on the gamble that it would sometime be irrigated, and when the land was included in a reclamation project sold their lands to settlers at prices which not only included the value that the government had '"Secretary of the Interior, Annual Report, 1930, pp. 19-22. 1S° Act of May 27, 1937, 50 Stat., Part 1, p. 208. |