Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

In order to finance the CAP and Bridge and Marble Gorge dams, Ingram discovered, the Bureau planned to capture the revenues from Hoover, Parker, and Davis dams, after their power sales had paid them off in the late 1980s, and reroute them into the new projects. For one thing, the Bureau, under Reclamation law, had no business doing this. All surplus power revenues were supposed to revert to the Treasury, in order to compensate the taxpayers for having forgiven interest obligations on the irrigation features of the projects. But that was not the half of it. The whole rationale for the Grand Canyon dams was that the river would have to be augmented someday, and power dams were the only means of raising the money for an importation project. The new dams, however, would be terrifically expensive compared to their predecessors. Hoover had been built for the incredibly low sum of $50 million; Bridge Canyon would likely cost close to $1 billion. Because of their enormous cost, the new dams would see their revenues tied up for years, for decades, repaying their own costs and subsidizing the CAP—a subsidy that was crucial if the Bureau was to find anyone to buy its water. Even if revenues from Hoover, Parker, and Davis dams were added, all of that money would be consumed for a seemingly endless period paying for the new works and the CAP subsidy. It would be financing the depletion of the river; there would be no money for augmentation until long after the basin was predicted to ru...