Regional Resource Planning by the Federal Government
by C. Girard Davidson

I. Need for Resource Planning: the Region as Planning Unit
New cities of the world have arisen on the sturdy foundation of a good plan. Many cities, as a result, have already been destroyed by natural forces, and in our time many more are in such danger. In the United states, for example, Albuquerque, New Mexico, is gradually succumbing to the pressures of nature beyond its power to control. Increasing sediment deposits brought down by the Rio Grande River have already raised the river bed several feet higher than the main business and industrial sections of the city. The levee system becomes less and less effective. Flood damage is increasing. The water table is rising, threatening the effective operation of the drainage system and waterlogging irrigated farm lands. The destiny of this city is controlled not by planning for the city alone, but by the solution of erosion control and flood control problems in the upper river basin, and by an awareness of their relation to the life and health of the city.
The town of Vanport, Oregon, was utterly destroyed by a flood of the Columbia River in 1948. Fifty thousand people were made homeless, and $ 100 million of property was demolished. Vanport had been constructed from scratch as a war industry town. Vanport’s builders were in a position to choose the best available site and to put up a new city according to a plan. Here is a case where the folly and the peril of failure to control the river was made terrifyingly clear.
If it is agreed that consideration of the city’s economic base, which means ultimately its natural resource strength, is essential to effective urban planning, then it is important to look into the aims and purposes of resource planning and to discover how it can best be achieved. Natural resources can be broadly defined as lands, waters and minerals. Programs for their use include soil conservation, range and watershed management, generation and transmission of hydro-electric power, reclamation and irrigation of agricultural lands, management of forests, fisheries, wild animals and herds, minerals exploitation, stream navigation, flood control, pollution control, water supply, provisions for recreation, and so on. The balance, interdependence and interaction of natural resources is close and powerful. To make these resources serve his ends, man must understand their connected nature and deal with them as a single entity. A unit for control has to he found that is large enough to be effective and not so as to be unmanageable. This unit is the natural region.
How can a region be identified? Certainly it is not a state with its arbitrary political boundaries, nor even a combination of states. Nature has paid scant attention to man’s convenience in the distribution of resources. The coal deposits of our Appalachian Mountains are not confined within the artificial borders which were prescribed by Congress for Pennsylvania or West Virginia or Ohio. The Missouri River drains parts of ten states, but only Nebraska is completely contained in its watershed. Thus, the machinery of a state as an administrative subdivision is not adequate to plan and develop the resources which exist in a region. Nor have interstate compacts under which states f have joined together for planning, programming and administration proved satisfactory in the resource field. The necessity of securing the consent of all the states affected, in addition to the Congress, uniformly results in a charter so restrictive that planning for the best overall needs of the region is not possible (1).
In determining a region the attempt is made to discover natural boundaries to encompass a population that feels it has common interests and an area where the problems in natural resources development are similar. A region may be determined by the outlines of a river basin. Or by similarity in the character of the land, such as a desert or plains area. Or by geographical isolation, such as an island. Sometimes the homogeneity of the inhabitants and a likeness in cultural patterns and perhaps in economic characteristics can be the unifying factor. Regions within the United States vary widely. The general characteristics of some major ones are described in Appendix A. They differ in topography, in kind and wealth of resources, in climate, in degree of development, in culture, and so on. Clearly, the problems that arise in regard to resource planning in such dissimilar areas are different, and so therefore must be the solutions that are sought for those problems.

II. Criteria for Regional Planning
Are there then any principles of regional planning, any methods, or approaches that are equally true for all regions, wherever they exist in the world, and that many therefore serve as generally applicable guides for any resource problem we may have to tackle? In my opinion there are.
(a) All regions, no matter what the type or quality of the resources that exist there, can and should be dealt with in a comprehensive manner, with full recognition being given to the balance of nature and the need for maintaining it.
(b) The resources of a region where people live must be developed not only for the greatest benefit of those people but with their active support and participation. Only in this way can it be assured that the best plan will be devised, that it will be flexible enough to keep up with changing conditions, and that democratic values will be furthered.
An administrative mechanism must be devised that can act to realize these principles, i.e. an agency able to coordinate all resource management functions. so that it never loses sight of the forest for the trees; and that is able to decentralize its activities so as to encourage the greatest possible initiative and involvement in planning by the inhabitants of the area. These criteria for regional planning have been closely adhered to in one well-known undertaking in the United States - the TVA. But the TVA’s creation was a political freak growing out of the political and economic climate which existed during the depression of the 1930’s. Numerous attempts have been made since Senator Norris won his 12-year fight in 1933, to have similar regional resource agencies created by Congress, but none has succeeded (2).
In my opinion the TVA is an agency for resource management far superior to any other that exists in the United States. This is certainly not to say that TVA is without defects, or that it is not possible that a better agency can be created. If additional agencies of this type were established in other regions, I believe that serious national problems would be created that ardent TVA supporters often fail to recognize. But TVA is the best we have produced so far. Since the likelihood for achieving comprehensive planning machinery through legislation is small, other administrative techniques must be found. The administrator often wishes that Congress would give him an effective administrative organization before he is required to perform. No matter what his personal convictions are about proper planning, he is seldom in a position to wait until all the niceties are ironed out before he is compelled to make a decision.
From here on I would like to talk in a more personal way about my own experience as an administrator in a key spot as Assistant Secretary of the Government’s largest resource agency. This was my first experience in a central office. My previous governmental service had been four years as an attorney for TVA, during which time I lived in the Tennessee Valley, and a somewhat longer period as General Counsel of Bonneville Power Administration, one of Interior’s agencies whose headquarters were in Portland, Oregon. My entire resource agency experience had been in the field, and my thinking and orientation were toward local action. Thus, we always felt that, while we were striving to get things done in the region the bureaucratic oligarchy in Washington had no conception of our aims and aspirations and methods, and was so hogged down in red tape that if and when a decision were finally made it would probably be wrong, or too late.
The Secretary of Interior who took office in 1946 - and who shortly thereafter recommended my appointment as Assistant Secretary - was the first career public administrator to head the Department. He brought to it experience in state government and in regional resource administration, as well as in federal program administration. Soon after we assumed office we created a Program Staff, which was an innovation in Interior’s history (3). The man appointed as its director had our orientation to local and regional operations. During the long lifetime - over 100 years in some cases - of the Department’s bureaus, a rigid system of centralized control had grown up in which many of the administrators were so enmeshed that they refused or were unable to exercise the slightest ingenuity or imagination in reorganization efforts. For example, the bureaus had been repositories of all factual information, which they had all reserved the right to use or not use, as the occasion demanded. Wed discovered that bureaus fighting for pet programs often neglected to present to the Secretary’s office pertinent facts that might result in an adverse decision. We found that it was impossible to exercise good judgement in the absence of necessary data, but immediate administrative action was required in a number of cases to resolve basic conflicts between programs. The Program Staff was designed among other things to provide the Secretary with this basic factual information, and its operation quickly threw the bureaus into consternation and dismay.
Our attempts were directed toward achieving the basic principles of regional planning, i.e. (a) comprehensiveness, and (b) direction from the region. We hoped to accomplish these ends without having to alter the basic structure of the Department of the Interior. We felt that the administrators of the separate resource bureaus had to be made aware, which they seemed not to be, of the interrelatedness of the activities of all bureaus, and the Department’s need to keep the different agency programs in balance. To this end a Program Committee was set up, composed of the heads of all the resource bureaus in the Department. The members of this Committee were not happy with even this mild step in the direction of Department unification, and they fought it covertly, by sending their subordinates who had no authority to attend Committee meetings, by continuing to fail to supply the Program Staff with requested factual information, and so on. These efforts to unify and decentralize administration met with such determined resistance by bureau heads that we soon realized that progress was impossible unless these officials were eliminated, and in many cases their assistants and personal staffs as well.
The purpose of decentralization and the best means of achieving it was to have authority assumed in the region, instead of in the Interior Building in Washington, D. C. As much as we could, we brought in people who had been showing ingenuity in the field service to direct or assume important roles in the bureau’s central office. We strove for decentralization by encouraging, pushing, and on occasion ordering the bureaus to establish like regional boundaries for their jurisdictions (many bureaus operated on a statewide basis, as some still do), and to establish their regional headquarters in the same city (4).The delegation of authority from the central office to their regional bureau heads was closely scrutinized not only to see that as much jurisdiction as possible was conferred but also in an attempt to see that all regional directors had approximately equal authority in dealing with resource problems affecting the agency. Bureau decentralization was made even more difficult and tedious by legal and financial restrictions that had been imposed over the past decades, such as legislative ceilings on personnel for field offices. And normally enough, when a function that had theretofore been administered in Washington was transferred to the field, the Senatorial and Congressional friends of the bureau chief involved would usually set up a hue and cry about the “changes that are being made without Congressional authorization”.
The regional offices of the bureaus were encouraged to work in close cooperation with the business, labor and civic groups of the communities in which they operated. The Bonneville Power Administration Advisory Council, composed of community leaders in the Northwest states, is one of the largest and most diversified of such groups. The Bureau of Land Management utilizes local advisory committees on its timber road problems with good results.
But decentralization of bureaus alone does not result in regional resource planning programs. Temporary field committees made up of representatives of the bureaus within the Interior Department were tried in an attempt to secure regional coordination. The chairmanship rotated among the bureaus, and there was no full time staff. It was early discovered that without staff assistance for the group as a whole, as distinguished from that available to each single-purpose agency, little basic thinking and overall programming occurred. Staff was made possible when permanent Interior Department field committees were established (5). The chairman became a full-time representative of the Secretary and had a small staff which was in a position to assemble the facts needed to sustain a comprehensive program against the onslaught of those presented by single-purpose agencies (6).
A similar field committee was established in the Pacific Northwest for activities carried on by the Department of Agriculture, with approximately the same regional boundaries and with the same city designated as headquarters as Interior’s field committee. The Columbia Basin Inter-Agency Committee was established to provide a means by which the field representatives of federal departments might effectively interchange information and coordinate their activities among themselves and with all of the States of the region. The federal agencies included, besides Interior and Agriculture, were the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Army, the Federal Power Commission and the Federal Security Agency. Here, however, the committee chairmanship rotates annually among agencies; the Committee has no staff except that donated by the member agencies; and, of course, no authority to enforce any decision, nor are its members bound by any finding of the committee (7). This inter-agency coordinating committee, then, is a very different sort of regional resource planning mechanism than the TVA type of independent corporation, and far less effective. However, the Committee can and does serve a limited but highly useful purpose, and has been successful in obtaining unanimous agreement on a number of sound programs (8).
It was gratifying in our Interior Department experience to see how more and more the resistance of bureau representatives in the field melted, and how they came to accept, and then to believe in regional development of comprehensive plans. And, finally, after sufficient exposure to the spirit of the region, how some were willing to stand up and do battle for their agreed upon overall programs against the more narrow concepts of their bureau chiefs in Washington. Of course, we realize that the type of administration I have described is at best a halfway measure. It leaves many serious and difficult resource problems undecided until, at long last, a representative the President or the Congress takes a hand. But for me, as an administrator, this was a way of attempting to secure ultimate objectives within existing framework.
Ultimately, regional resource planning will provide for full utilization of our remaining resources for the greatest benefit of the people. But this will only come when the people in the region understand why it is important, and when they are willing to participate - and provide leadership in developing a program designed to meet their needs. When this awareness is translated into action, an administrative mechanism capable of handling resource problems on a regional basis will emerge.

APPENDIX

A. A description of Major United States regions

B. Obstacles to comprehensive planning:
1) Administrative organization
2) Divided responsibility in the Congress
3) Adverse pressures.

APPENDIX A: Description of Major United States Regions.

The following paragraphs describe general characteristics of some major United States regions and indicate briefly the main economic problems each region faces.

l. Pacific Northwest.
The valley of the magnificent Columbia River is one of the world’s richest regions in natural resources. It is land of giant mountains and swift rivers, today not only the nation’s chief source of low-cost hydroelectric power but also potential producer of more power than any comparable area in the world. The Northwest harbors the nation’s greatest stands of timber - vast forest of Douglas fir, western hemlock and Ponderosa pine. Here are the only virgin forests left in the United States, our last supplies of plywood timber, our only great source of heavy construction timber. The area is rich in mineral reserves and has developed a diversified and abundant agriculture and a profitable fishing industry: But the region is still sorely underdeveloped and its resource abundance is being threatened. Power resources are so far only 20 per cent developed, Three-fourths of the crop land is seriously eroded. The annual drain on the timber supply is twice the annual growth. The region’s major production is raw and semi-finished agricultural, forest and mineral products that go elsewhere for fabrication. Discriminatory freight rates work against the area’s development. Only 3 per cent of the nation’s people live on 9 per cent of the nation’s land area, but population growth has been remarkable - constituting an increase of 39 per cent since 1940 as against 13 per cent for the United States as a whole. This has caused a shortage of jobs, and not enough power is being introduced to encourage the establishment of new industry.

2. Rio Grande Basin in the Southwest.
In startling contrast to the rich Pacific Northwest is the Rio Grande Basin in New Mexico and Texas. This area is so short of basic resources, mainly water, that its prospects for growth are at best limited, and it may even be hard put to maintain its present economic status. The region is a generally arid and semi-arid desert land with streams providing only limited water supplies ill comparison to the requirements for stock watering, municipal supply, irrigation and other purposes. The Basin’s economy is founded on stock raising, irrigation agriculture, and extraction of minerals. The are no extensive water power or forestry resources either developed or waiting development. While defense installations during and after the war have expanded the economy of New Mexico, the possibilities for long-range industrial development are limited. Industries based on processing of minerals and agricultural products of the region have to face a shortage in cheap power sources and water supply, and are unfavorably affected by the great distance from the region to large markets. The mineral reserves of the area are facing exhaustion. Expansion of agriculture and the livestock industry is likewise severely limited by the available surface and ground water supply. Even the present level of activities in these fields is threatened by erosion and siltation. There is a real question as to how long the irrigation and municipal water supply can continue to depend upon underground water which is now being pumped out in quantities far beyond the capacity for annual replenishment by rainfall. Erosion is further reducing the carrying capacity of the range, which is already low compared to other regions. Siltation in the rivers resulting from erosion is raising the level of the stream beds and waterlogging irrigated lands along the river. This also poses flood problems for many of the cities. The greatest ingenuity is needed to prevent the sort of disaster which destroyed the economies of the ancient Babylonians and the Southwest Indians who were unable to solve similar soil and water problems.

3. New England.
New England differs from the underdeveloped regions of the West in that it has homogeneity, a strong cultural tradition, and a mature economy which in the last century led the nation in manufacturing, shipping and finance. The region has a concentrated population and a greater proportion of manufacturing than the rest of the country. New England is a region composed of many small states, crisscrossed by streams. It is a scenic area of old, rounded mountains and lovely wooded countryside. Not as richly endowed with natural resources as many of the western regions, it still has important advantages. A large proportion of its vast productive plant and community facilities is still usable. It has a reservoir of skilled workers trained in diversified types of industrial activity . It has an untapped hydro-power potential in its streams which is roughly equal to the present total of electric generation in the region. Use of this power might make economic the production and processing of native minerals such as manganese. The natural beauties of the region make it a national resort and playground, and recreation is already the leading industry in some states. Fish and forest resources both support profitable industries and offer, through more intensive development, real promise for more job and payrolls. Development of the region’s natural resources took place years ago and in many respects is based on practices which are now outmoded, such as isolated water power sites for each factory. Most of the resource problems of the region revolve around its rivers. Disastrous floods have occurred almost annually. The decline in fisheries has been due in large measure to pollution of the rivers. In recent years the economy of the region has been declining in relation to the nation as a whole. During the past ten years New England’s income slipped from $1.26 to $1.06 for every dollar of income per person in the United States. Its share of the national population has declined 2 per cent, of building 6 per cent, of factory workers 13 per cent, and of bank deposits 23 per cent. Capital has left the region, as have many of the young people, and new industries are by-passing New England for other areas. Some of the causes appear to be, first, low productivity resulting from inefficient, out-of-date plants and machinery; and, second, high cost of power which puts the region at a competitive disadvantage. Electric rates in the region are the highest in the nation. The difference in power costs between New England and the South, for instance, put New England industrialists at a disadvantage which cost them about 60 million dollars in 1947.

4. Missouri Basin.
The Basin, which covers one-sixth of the area of the United States, is characterized by physical and climatic extremes and has been visited with such paradoxes as devastating: floods during the drought period of the 30’s. The region divided itself naturally into three zones, each with distinctive natural conditions and resources problems. The eastern third of the Basin is generally flat delta land characterized by moderately dense settlement, relatively stable and diversified agriculture, and an increasingly important urban life based largely on the manufacture and distribution of commodities used or produced in the other zones of the Basin. In the western zone - Montana, Wyoming and Colorado - there are a few widely separate concentrations of population. These clusters of cities at the crossroads of transportation are founded chiefly on minerals industries and irrigation agriculture, and to a lesser extent on lumbering, range livestock industry and very limited manufacturing of small articles. Separating these population islands are the sparsely-settled mountain areas, some forested and some of them semi-arid high plains or plateaus, in large part publicly owned and generally not suited to cultivation. The vast middle zone is an endlessly flat plains land of great economic hazard. It was the dust bowl of the 30’s and is again threatened with serious drought. As a result, it is an area of chronic instability with violent economic changes and movements and counter-movements of a relatively sparse population. Efforts to occupy and exploit the middle zone have depended mainly on agriculture and have frequently resulted in ruining the land and bankrupting the people. Through these three diverse zones runs a single river system which has a certain unifying effect on the Basin. Inevitably the three zones are drawn together by the need for developing the river for purposes of navigation, flood control, power generation, irrigation and water supply. No one zone can do the job alone.
A major resource problem in the Missouri Basin is stabilization and diversification of agriculture on a basis that will protect the soil as well as provide a steady income to the farmer’s. New manufacturing industries and jobs are needed to check the trend toward declining population and to raise the level of per capita income, which has been generally low except for non-average high agricultural prices in war and post-war years. There are in the Basin minerals, such as oil shale and phosphate, which can be combined with electric power to foster new industry. Some power can be obtained from the river, but the largest opportunities are in use in steam plants of the extensive lignite and sub-bituminous coal deposits. Another river basin should at least be mentioned. The Ohio, which runs through one of our richest industrial areas, is probably the best example of single-purpose development. Here navigation was the primary objective and the structures built do little in controlling the devastating floods of that region or in providing for its electric power requirements. Pollution, both industrial and domestic, is serious, and soil erosion, particularly from the Kentucky side, adds to the pollution problem. This loss of soil constitutes even a greater problem in the destruction of land values. Regional development work, to a greater or lesser extent, has taken place in the Arkansas White-Ouchita basin; in the Central Valley of California; and in the Colorado basin. There are other areas of the United States, such as the states that cluster around the Great Lakes, and in some of the southern states, that have not yet been included in any type of regional planning. The Tennessee Valley is the one region in the United States that has been subjected to comprehensive resource development. Inasmuch as at least one paper to be presented to the Seminar deals in detail with this region, there is no need to provide yet another description of the Tennessee Valley.

APPENDlX B: Obstacles to comprehensive planning.

l. Administrative organization.
Governmental responsibility for handling natural resources in the United States is divided in an illogical manner among a number of different executive departments and independent agencies. Almost all the Federal administrative units were established by separate legislative act for specific limited purposes. Some programs handled by these agencies are as old as the Federal Government itself, notably the promotion of stream navigation. As the Congress decided a new program was necessary, it set up an agency to handle the specific problem. Not until 190s did the basic unity of natural resources find public recognition. In that year President Theodore Roosevelt expressed the then new concept of the conservation movement when he said: “Each river system, from its headwaters in the forest to its mouth on the coast, is a single unit and should he treated as such”.
But by that time existing government agencies had already carved out separate domains; by 1951 each jurisdiction had become firmly entrenched. No serious effort had been made to unify the institutions which had grown up piecemeal and haphazard. In that year, the Hoover Commission on the Reorganization of the Executive Branch of the Government complained: “The public lands and water resources of the nation have all been tied together by nature - only the government insists on treating them separately”.
The single-purpose agencies had grown and confidently pursued their separate ways. Esprit de corps developed within each agency, and each was jealous of its prerogatives. Competition among the agencies rather than cooperation became the practice. The Federal administrative machinery is not only by and large obsolete and unable to cope with the problems it must deal with but renders coordinated and orderly development of resources virtually impossible, even when administrators’ intentions are the best. The result often is total or partial neglect of important aspects of resource development, or unbalanced handling. Dramatic projects, like the construction of government dams, tend to get over-emphasized at the expense of less glamorous but equally valuable operations, such as minerals research, land management, and the collection of basic physical data.
Most of the resource agencies reside in the Department of the Interior. The Bureau of Reclamation builds dams and irrigation works and generates electric power while reclaiming arid lands; the Bureau of Mines assists in developing mineral deposits and in their processing; the Geological Survey does basic mineral exploration and assembles topographic, geologic and hydrologic data; the Bureau of Land Management administers the 412.000.000 acres of public land of the United States and in so doing protects the ranges and watersheds and handles the minerals contained therein; the Fish and Wildlife Service has the responsibilities its name implies and actively engages in wild animal protection; the National Park Service preserves our scenic assets and protects historical monuments and wilderness areas; and the Secretary of Interior sells the electric power generated by all government dams (except TVA), irrespective of the agency constructing it through regional agencies such as Bonneville Power Administration, the South-western Power Administration, the Southeastern Power Administration, etc. The Department of Agriculture is also involved with basic agricultural resources. Its Soil Conservation Service handles watershed management and fosters land conservation practices; the Forest Services manages the national forests and cooperates with states in the handling of other forest resources.
In any region there are at least a score of Federal agencies concerned with resources planning. These are single-purpose agencies attempting to carry out multi-purpose functions. It is inevitable that conflicts arise. Since both the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation have responsibility for river control work, they have repeatedly overlapped each other and been at loggerheads. They have occasionally both been authorized by Congress to do the same job at the same time in the same place. Both were authorized to construct the Pine Flat dam on the King’s River in California. There was no machinery in the region to settle such controversies and this one was bucked back to Washington. During the interminable period it took to settle the matter, the people of the region were deprived of the needed benefits of a project on the river.
There is divided responsibility For hydroelectric power projects, dams and power plants are constructed by Reclamation or the Engineers, but the marketing of the power in the Pacific Northwest is the responsibility of the Bonneville Power Administration. Bonneville must repay the Treasury from power revenues for the cost of the power facilities in the dams; but the dam.-constructing agencies and sometimes also the Federal Power Commission determines how large this bill will be. Bonneville is responsible for meeting the power needs of the region, but the dam-building agencies schedule when and in which order the power plants will be built. The continuing power shortage in the Pacific Northwest is, to some extent, a result of this situation. A dam can block the migration of anadromous fish to their spawning grounds and thus destroy a portion of the fish run in a stream: the shad run in the Connecticut River has been so injured By Enfield dam. A dam can flood out lands which belong to Indians by ancient treaty rights: at Garrison dam in the Missouri Basin this has forced the painful relocation of more than a thousand Indians. A dam can destroy important national recreational values: Mammoth Cave is now threatened by a projected dam on the Green River in Kentucky. Construction of a dam can flood out valuable mineral deposits: the Buggs Island reservoir on the Roanoke River in Virginia at highest flood stage would have damaged nearby tungsten deposits had not public protest forced construction of dikes to protect them. Because one agency is responsible for building a dam and another agency is responsible for conserving the resources that might be threatened, reconciliation of these conflicting interests is seldom easy.
Responsibility for land management is divided, too. An adequate flood control program, for example, includes not only reservoirs and levees in the stream but also measures to control the runoff in the upstream watershed. The reservoir and levee work is handled by the Engineers, whereas the Department of Agriculture and, to a lesser extent, the Department of the Interior, have the responsibility for upstream watershed management. In the Missouri Basin the Engineers’ portion of the flood control plan was adopted by the Congress in 1944, whereas the Department of Agriculture portion of the plan was not proposed until 1949, by which time units of the Engineers’ program were already under construction. There are many problems in regard to land Use: the rules governing cattle grazing in national forests administered by the Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture are entirely different from those of the Bureau of Land Management in the Interior Department which administers the public lands. The benighted cattle wander from one to the other without understanding that they must eat more or less grass in the new jurisdiction.
Another example of unbalanced land use programs is the present situation in the Pacific Northwest. There, the Bureau of Reclamation is expending close to $ 500 an acre to convert a million acres of arid desert into crop land by use of irrigation. In another section, where erosion is critical, we stand to lose a million acres of crop land because expenditures there for soil conservation average only $ 6 an acre. Obviously, little is gained if we bring in a million new acres of land while letting an existing million acres wash down the river. Another result of this administrative muddle is the inadequate accumulation of data. Plans for specific projects have been developed and sent to the Congress founded on inadequate hydrologic or geologic data, simply because such data did not exist. In the Missouri Basin, for example, it has been reported officially that, when the Reclamation Engineers program was authorized in 1944, the available basic topographic, geologic and hydrologic data were “very inadequate” for the detailed planning, construction and operation of such extensive development works. Basic data is collected largely by the United States Geological Survey, and this little-publicized, unspectacular agency has always had to struggle for its meager appropriation. At the present rate it will take 50 to 100 years to complete a nationwide system of up-to-date maps. Large areas of the country have never been mapped at all.
Financial policies applicable to similar projects are another source of conflict. Similar projects built by different agencies are governed by quite different policies of allocation and repayment of costs. The beneficiaries of navigation projects and flood control reservoirs pay nothing for the service; it is charged off as a public benefit. The beneficiaries of power and irrigation projects, however, must pay for these services, and the total cost of these projects is returned to the Treasury. Thus, the process of putting water on the land through irrigation must be paid for by the water users, whereas the process of taking water off the land through flood control and drainage in most cases costs the beneficiaries little or nothing. Because of these different repayment policies, states and localities are given the opportunity to “shop around” among the different agencies to see where they can get the best deal. Reclamation and the Engineers were thus played off against each other in California’s Central Valley, and are now being put in the same situation by Texas municipalities seeking water-supply projects. These problems have caused considerable concern within the Executive Branch and steady progress is being made in reconciling these conflicts. The Executive Office of the President is an effective instrument for settling the more obvious ones. Furthermore, in its analyses of the budget of each agency before the budget is presented to the Congress, this office has vast influence in determining which agency proceeds with a particular program. From time to time commission have been created to study such problems and to recommend solutions. Thus, the President’s Water Resources Policy Commission (1951) gave considerable impetus to the regional multi-purpose concept in planning in its proposal for river basin commissions (9).

2. Divided responsibility in the Congress.
Legislation affecting projects for flood control and navigation to be built by the Corps of Engineers comes to one committee in each House of the Congress; legislation for irrigation projects of the Bureau of Reclamation comes to another committee; and legislation on watershed management projects of the Department of Agriculture comes to a third committee. Appropriations requests for these different projects also come to separate subcommittees in each House. It is difficult, therefore, for the Congress to obtain an overall comprehensive view of resources planning for a specific region or river basin. Coordination of plans and timing of projects under these circumstances is rare even when the different agencies concerned agree on plans and schedules.

3. Adverse pressures.
Special legislation to consolidate resource planning activities cuts into the jurisdiction and influence of chairmen of Congressional committees, and is therefore not usually popular with them. There is often resistance to federal planning on the part of state governments who tend to be fearful of real or imagined “states rights”. And other forces combine in opposition to unified regional development. Officials of the powerful single-purpose bureaus unite in standing firm against a threat to their jurisdiction (the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Army Engineers are the most powerful such agencies where river basins are concerned and the most watchful). Back of each single-purpose bureau stand private groups, banded together in the cause of a special interest, prepared to protect their pet agency from encroachment. Prominent among these special interest groups are the privately-owned electric power utilities, the contractors who have a stake in Army or other agency construction contracts, waterway association, outdoor societies, and so on.
 
 
 

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