THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



243 



ARE THESE LANE'S VIEWS ON REVALUATION? 



following dispatch from Washington, which 

 * has been appearing in Federal irrigation project 

 newspapers, bears ci-cry ci'iden-ce that it is inspired by 

 lii^Ii officials in the Reclamation Scrricc. Docs it rep- 

 resent Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane's 

 views? 



Washington. A revaluation of all government irri- 

 gation projects is now being made, under order of Sec- 

 retary Lane, with a view to determining whether set- 

 tlers are paying too much or too little for water for 

 their lands, and for the maintenance of the projects. 

 Based on this revaluation, and new estimates of the 

 cost of projects, the charges assessed settlers are to be 

 revised, and until the work is completed it will not be 

 known how the various projects will be affected. 



While, in some instances, this revaluation may re- 

 sult in a reduction of water and maintenance charges, 

 the indications are that on many projects the charges 

 will be increased. And for this reason: the Reclama- 

 tion fund, under the Reclamation Act, is a permanent, 

 revolving fund, and the law contemplated that every 

 dollar expended should be returned to the fund by the 

 settlers on the land. There is no direct appropriation 

 out of the treasury to pay for the Washington or other 

 offices of the Reclamation Service, and all overhead 

 expense must be prorated, to be paid ultimately by the 

 settlers. 



This means that the settler must not only pay his 

 pro rata share of the cost of building the project upon 

 which he is located, but he must contribute something 

 toward the cost of administering the Service generally, 



and toward defraying all general expenses. But it has 

 been discovered that there is another expense that must 

 be taken care of, that has not been reckoned on up to 

 this time. From the date of the organization of the 

 Reclamation Service to June 30, 1914, there has been 

 expended nearly $900,000 on surveys and preliminary 

 examinations of projects that have not been adopted 

 or constructed, and many of them never will be under- 

 taken by the government. 



Inasmuch as the government probably will not 

 undertake the construction of any new projects for sev- 

 eral years to come, and in view of the further fact that 

 some thirty-five or forty projects have been examined 

 and more or less sun-eyed, only to be abandoned, the 

 officials in charge have come to the conclusion that 

 there must be an accounting ; in fact, they construe the 

 Reclamation law to demand an accounting which will 

 assess all costs against the settlers. This means, in all 

 probability, that the settlers must not only pay back to 

 the government the cost of projects which are being 

 or have been built, but must be taxed with the further 

 burden of paying for the cost of surveys of projects 

 never adopted or constructed. 



Before these additional costs are assessed against 

 the settlers, however, the question probably will be pre- 

 sented to Congress in order that it may have an oppor- 

 tunity of saying how the moneys spent on surveys of 

 abandoned projects shall be reimbursed. If Congress 

 decides to make a direct appropriation from the treas- 

 ury to cover these costs the settlers will be relieved of 

 paying for surveys from which they get no benefit. 



CALLS HIGH WATER CHARGES CONFISCATION 



FULFILLMENT of the settlers' original contract 

 with the government, providing for a charge of 

 $25 per acre, without any extras or alterations, was 

 demanded by water users on the Uncompahgre proj- 

 ect in Colorado during the Review Board's hearings at 

 Montrose. 



Among the witnesses examined were F. D. Catlin, 

 J. F. Kyle, W. E. Obert, L. E. Ross, George Conklin, 

 C. M. Ryan and Ira Monell. Each one of these men 

 participated in the gathering of the subscriptions to the 

 project and all were emphatic in their declaration that 

 the land was subscribed on the understanding that the 

 cost would not exceed $25 per acre. The witnesses 

 quoted the government officials, including Mr. Newell, 

 Bien, Davis, McConnell, Fellows, as their authorities 

 for representing to the land owners that the cost would 

 not exceed that amount. In fact, the articles of incor- 

 poration of the Water Users' Association specifically 

 represented that the cost would not exceed $25 per 

 acre with the possibility of the cost even being as low 

 as $17 per acre. 



Min'Catlin argued that a charge of from $50 to 

 $75 an acre would practically mean the confiscation of 

 75,000 acres of land. He found no fault with the work 

 of the construction of the project and believed that in 

 the main the money had been judiciously spent. For 

 that reason he could see no relief in the hope of find- 

 ing here or there an item of a few thousand dollars 



which might be deducted from the project even if the 

 total ran up to as much as $200,000. The only relief 

 he could see would be for the government to cut off a 

 big slice of the cost so as to bring it somewhere near 

 the original estimate upon which the land subscriptions 

 were secured. 



George W. Bruce, president of the Uncompahgre 

 Water Users' Association, suggested as a possible solu- 

 tion of the Reclamation problem that the government 

 retain the Reclamation projects and sell the water to 

 the water users on the basis of about two per cent in- 

 terest on the investment in the projects. On this basis 

 it is figured out that the water would cost the Uncom- 

 pahgre farmer $2 an acre per year, half of which 

 would represent interest to the government and half 

 of which would represent maintenance and operation. 

 This would be perpetual, however, with no provisions 

 of the water users ever becoming owners of the 

 project. 



PUMP REFERENCE BOOK 



Royal C. Wise, 9 South Clinton street, Chicago, 

 has just issued his reference bulletin, containing 

 commercial information on pumping machinery. The 

 matter relates especially to electrically driven direct 

 connected centrifugal pumps, sump pumps, gasoline 

 engine outfits, and deep well supplies. 



