The reason for the prohibition was simple. “Well, of course you couldn’t build a dam—a dam that costs millions of dollars—on land you didn’t own,” explains a Bureau official. “If someone else owns the land, you’re just a tenant, and what are you going to do if the landlord says: ‘I don’t want the dam on my land any more. Get it off!’? What are you going to do? You can’t move a dam.” The prohibition had, moreover, been reaffirmed, without qualification, in every opinion on the subject by a federal court or a federal agency.
