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Show 560 INTERSTATE ADJUDICATIONS Ferry required by the Compact-7,500,000 acre-feet-Nevada be given 300,000 acre-feet, Arizona 3,000,000, and California 4,200,000, and that unapportioned waters, subject to ^apportionment after 1963, be shared equally by Arizona and California. Each Lower Basin State would have "the exclusive beneficial consumptive use of such tributaries within its boundaries before the same empty into the main stream," except that Arizona tributary waters in excess of 1,000,000 acre-feet could under some circumstances be subject to diminution by reason of a United States treaty with Mexico. This proposal foundered because California held out for 4,600,000 acre-feet instead of 4,200,000 25 and because Arizona held out for complete exemption of its tributaries from any part of the Mexican burden.26 Between 1922 and 1927 Congressman Philip Swing and Senator Hiram Johnson, both of California, made three attempts to have Swing-Johnson bills enacted, authorizing construction of a dam in the canyon section of the Colorado River and and an all-American canal.27 These bills would have carried out the original Fall-Davis Report's recommendations that the river problem be recognized and treated as national, not local. Arizona's Senators and Congressmen, still insisting upon a definite guaranty of water from the mainstream, bitterly fought these proposals because they failed to provide for exclusive use of her own tributaries, particularly the Gila, and for exemption of these trib- utaries from the Mexican burden. Finally, the fourth Swing-Johnson bill passed both Houses and became the Boulder Canyon Project Act of December 21, 1928, 45 Stat. 1057. The Act authorized the Secretary of the Interior to con- struct, operate, and maintain a dam and other works in order to control floods, improve navigation, regulate the river's flow, store and dis- tribute waters for reclamation and other beneficial uses, and generate electrical power.28 The projects authorized by the Act were the same as those provided for in the prior defeated measures, but in other significant respects the Act was strikingly different. The earlier bills had offered no method whatever of apportioning the waters among the States of the Lower Basin. The Act as finally passed did provide such a method, and, as we view it, the method chosen was a complete statutory apportionment intended to put an end to the long-standing dispute over Colorado River waters. To protect the Upper Basin against California should Arizona still refuse to ratify the Compact,29 § 4 (a) of the Act as finally passed provided that, if fewer than seven States ratified within six months, the Act should not take effect unless six States including California ratified and unless California, by its legislature, agreed "irrevocably and unconditionally . . . as an express covenant" to a limit on its annual consumption of Colorado River water of "four million four hundred thousand acre-feet of the waters 28 Hearings on H.R. 5773 before the House Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation, 70th Cong., 1st Sess. 402-405 (1928). -" Id., at 30-31. Arizona also objected to the provisions concerning electrical power. 27 H.R. 11449, 67th Cong., 2d Sess. (1922) ; H.R. 2903, S. 727, 68th Cong., 1st Sess. (1923) ; H.R. 9826, S. 3331, 69th Cong., 1st Sess. (1926). 28 Another purpose of the Act was to approve the Colorado River Compact, which had allocated the water between the two basins. 28 The Upper Basin States feared that, if Arizona did not ratify the Compact, the division of water between the Upper and Lower Basins agreed on in the Compact would he nullified. The reasoning was that Arizona's uses would not be charged against the Lower Basin's apportionment and that California would therefore be free to exhaust that apportionment herself. Total Lower Basin uses would then be more than permitted in the Compact, leaving less water for the Upper Basin. |
