Browning Chief

Water Policy Wasteful?

Probably the most damning indictment of our present wasteful national water policy ever to be written has just been turned over to President Truman's new Water Resources Policy commission, according to the Wildlife Management Institute. An 80-man committee of the Engineers Joint Council, representing the country's five major engineering societies, prepared the report, which is couched in clear, sharply worded language.

About one-third of the committee members have served with federal agencies, and the authority of the report is unimpeachable.

Nine task forces made the basic study. The report deplored "ambiguous, uncoordinated, and conflicting'' federal policies concerning power, irrigation, flood control navigation, and other water resources projects. Warning that "evaluation of project is the first requisite," the report attacked boon-doggling and log-rolling in stressing such items as local responsibility, need for equitable allocation of costs, and the "fallacy of incentive payments" to landowners for soil conservation practices.

Although the report did not direct itself to the activities of any one agency, it cited the fact that the Department of the Interior, Corps of Engineers, Department of Agriculture, Federal Power Commission, U.S. Public Health Service, Weather Bureau, Coast and Geodetic Survey, and many others are concerned with one phase or another of water development. As the number of federal agencies involved has grown and as these have risen in stature their overlapping functions have become increasingly striking and their competitions have become impressively expensive." The present situation is described as "chaotic." Haphazard development of vital water resources was denounced by the engineers who especially decried projects developed and constructed, and often operated, by the agency originating them.

To alleviate competition between agencies, which is fostered by this practice, and to safeguard the public against exaggerated intangible benefit claims as well as improper allocation of costs between general taxpayers and project beneficiaries, the report recommended creation of a board for the impartial analysis and appraisal of all federal water projects. Such a board would also serve to protect the public against "the present excessive and economically unsound rate of planning and congressional authorizing of developments," since the board's review would be "prerequisite to the authorization of appropriation by congress of or for projects of this kind."