Essay by Phil Doe
Water – October 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Old West Moves East
When I was a boy, my farm town used to put on a show called a greased-pig contest. A young pig would be greased up and set free in a watered down arena. To the delight of townspeople, the local kids would climb inside the arena and attempt to catch the pig, which they would soon learn was smarter, faster, and slicker than they’d ever expected.
This tradition has moved east, and the Eastern version of this sport is even slicker and greasier than the contests I remember. I saw a rousing greased-pig chase just the other day. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee provided the arena. The Navajo Indian Settlement Act, S1171, was the greased prize, and a planeload of freeloaders from New Mexico were the eager participants.
Before this show could come to Washington, advance men had to convince the New Mexicans that they wanted this circus. Chief among the new breed of advance men was the Bush administration’s new Secretary of Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, former Governor of Idaho. He had proven essential to the carnival atmosphere by issuing a slick opinion, called a hydrologic determination, that there is more water in the Colorado River than anyone ever imagined.
So how is there more water? Why, because our diminished rivers no longer fill our shrunken reservoirs. Ergo, there is less evaporation from these reservoirs and therefore more water available from our rivers. Thus, we enter the head-spinning world of New-Science-on-the-Potomac where politics trumps all reason and common sense.
And what’s to be done with this miracle water derived from the drought-stricken Colorado River? Well, that plane load of free-loading politicians and assorted hangers-on, headed by representatives for presidential aspirant Bill Richardson, had come east expecting to celebrate the easy passage of S1171.
After that, Kempthorne’s miracle water could be used to expand the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project (NIIP) and to build a billion dollar pipeline to Gallup, New Mexico, and to portions of the Navajo Reservation — with all but a sliver of the costs coming at the taxpayers’ expense. As for the Navajo-Gallup pipeline, the Indian Health Services will have to find hundreds of millions of dollars more to get the water to the intended Indians, especially those living seasonally in isolated traditional dwellings known as hogans.
In the case of Gallup, a city of about 30,000 souls, its ruling elite dream of becoming the new Moab. Gallup would serve as an affluent oasis for mountain-biking, boutique-browsing, beer-swilling Yuppiedom — if they only had the water.
Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of S1171 is that the billion-dollar, federally-constructed NIIP could lose large amounts of money every year — even though Congress, for decades, has funded all of its operating costs, ignoring Congress’s own long-standing prohibition against doing so.
SOME SUSPECT PAYOLA. But it may be that these dizzying sporting contests are just too exciting to give up. Whatever the reason, the long over-due accounting of all the Indian irrigation projects and the outsized lies undergirding them give finer definition to what Washington means when it promises to help the Indians.
Despite all of the advance work done to make the hearing a greased success, however, a damper was put on what should have been a festive event. And the wet blanket was imposed by the most unlikely of participants, the Department of Interior — the very people who’d preached the good news that the Colorado River was brimming with new water for new projects. The Department announced that since it had not participated in the New Mexico Indian negotiations, which resulted in the Navajo Settlement Act currently before the Committee, it could not support it.
There was no hush, because at these affairs there are no surprises.
Out of 23 senators on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, only two were in attendance, both from New Mexico. Putting on an amateurish act of sputtering disbelief so common to western melodrama, Jeff Bingaman, the Committee chair, played the good cop, while Pete Domenici, the Committee’s Ranking Member, played the bad cop. In fact, Domenici could be heard declaiming loudly, off mike, that they would just take this plan to the Corp of Engineers if Interior didn’t fall in line.
And why did Interior, the Department of Bad Irrigation Projects, as it’s known out west, decide to wreck a hearing that had every indication of being staged for quick passage of S1171?
THE NEW Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, Bob Johnson, speaking for Interior, said the bill did not comport with longstanding policy requiring, among other things, that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review the economic feasibility of Indian settlements and the costs of other alternatives.
Imagine my surprise at this complete turnabout, since only weeks earlier I had brought the subject of economic review of the Navajo settlement up with Mr. Johnson at a Bureau conference entitled “Managing for Excellence.”
In that setting, Johnson had told me it was not the habit of Reclamation to require economic evaluation of Indian projects even though federal policy required it. I asked if they didn’t think it was important to know if the public’s money was being well spent on these projects, particularly in light of the fact that the NIIP lost money, lots of it, every year. No answer was forthcoming other than a meaningless deflection about everyone having a right to an opinion.
But that harkens back to another subplot in this growing western melodrama. Several years ago, when the infamous Animas-La Plata project, another purported Indian project, was up for funding, the small grassroots organization I chair insisted that the published policy governing Indian water settlements should be observed, including an economic evaluation.
We consulted with the OMB and were told their office had been directed to butt out. Moreover, the attorney representing the Department of Interior, a flack by the name of Mike Connors, told us straight out that, while the policy was still in force, Interior was free to apply it selectively. This all took place during the Clinton administration when the hapless Bruce Babbitt was running Interior, thus giving the lie to the idea that the Bush administration invented the concept of executive exception. (Mr. Connors can now be found working for Senator Bingaman as counsel for the Committee.)
And then there are the absent 21, the members of the Committee who sensibly were not at the recent event, because they presumably knew, first hand, that someone else’s greased legislation is nothing to wrestle with. However, Ken Salazar, the Senator from Colorado who’s noted for his easy collapse into a compromising position on almost any and all issues, should have been there — unless he truly believes the water alchemy concocted by Interior.
But presuming that this miraculously discovered “new” water isn’t available, the water Senators Bingaman and Domenici are claiming for New Mexico belongs to the people of Colorado under an interstate treaty called the Colorado River Compact, and Salazar should be protecting the interests of Coloradans. But remember he’s already caught his porker. It’s called the Animas-La Plata project and quid pro quos are what Washington runs on.
Is it too cynical, even in a world as obviously devoid of decency and justice as present-day Capitol Hill, to suggest that Senator Domenici’s recent conversion to the get-out-of-Iraq brigade might be a bargaining chip for billions of dollars in new water projects for New Mexico?
One thing is for sure, Mies van der Rohe’s dictum that “less is more” has been turned into a carnival of nonsense, greasy legislation and all.
In an interesting coda to the above, Senator Domenici, still in a “I want it, I get it” frame of mind, gave a direct warning to former Iowa congressman Jim Nussle, the Bush administration’s new designee to head OMB, that if OMB did not reverse course on S1171, he would not vote favorably for his confirmation.
AND THERE’S MORE. In a recent House hearing on its version of the Navajo settlement act, HR1970, Colorado congressman Mark Udall, apparently acting as surrogate for his cousin, New Mexico congressman Tom Udall who is HR1970’s sponsor, lit into Bob Johnson, Reclamation’s new commissioner.
Declaring himself the undying friend of the Indian, Udall said OMB had to get over its queasiness about how the public was being asked to spend its money, for after all hadn’t Governor Richardson promised at least $75 million toward a tax bill that will easily exceed $1 billion in construction costs alone? Wasn’t that enough? he intoned.
Never once did Mark Udall, the man who would be the next Democratic senator from Colorado, ask questions concerning the baffling hydrologic study. Never once did he elicit concern over the adverse impact this settlement would have on Colorado’s legitimate rights to water in the Colorado River under the interstate compact. And never once did he show concern that more irrigation for the Navajo might actually cause them to lose more money than presently.
Phil Doe, a former employee of the Bureau of Reclamation, lives in Littleton where he chairs the Citizens Progessive Alliance, which watches water projects.
