From the beginning of his Administration, President Eisenhower has favored a decrease in the huge financial responsibilities taken on by the Federal Government under the New Deal. His theory: U.S. prosperity is better served by local enterprise than by federal expansion. "Partnership" in water-resources development is one facet of the theory. The Administration argues that local power companies (public and private) should share costs and profits, cutting federal investment to costs beyond the reach of local enterprisers. Opponents say major projects should be wholly financed by the Government for "all the people."
Last week in Oregon, where partisanship has veiled the partnership program in obscurity, the issue came to life in a series of ten lively debates up and down the state between Democratic Senator Richard Neuberger and Republican Representative Sam Coon. Proposition: "The John Day* bill (introduced in the House last spring by Coon) is in the public interest."
The bill concerns a Northwest nightmare: a burning need for more and more power at cheap rates. The New Deal spent millions for dams on the Columbia River, made Northwesterners the nation's biggest consumers of hydroelectric power. But the huge Northwest power pool, 58% generated by the Government, brought so much new industry and population that today the Northwest may have a serious power shortage by 1960. Although new dams are badly needed, Congress is now reluctant to grant the whopping sums they would cost.
A Swallow? A debatable solution is Sam Coon's John Day bill, which proposes the most elaborate partnership deal so far. Three local private companies would pay $273 million for the power-producing features of a $310 million dam across the Columbia River, in return get priority on its output for 50 years. The Government would build John Day Dam, own it forever and pay $37 million for navigation and flood-control features, that return no profit. John Day would have a capacity of 1,105,000 kilowatts of power (twice the potential of Bonneville Dam), permit slackwater commercial navigation 328 miles up the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean to the wheat-growing Inland Empire.
Dick Neuberger, a highly vocal anti-partnership partisan, was spoiling to get a Republican on the debating platform, when Cattleman Sam Coon bravely accepted the challenge to defend his bill in public. Said Coon: "I've never run away from a fight in my life when I've knowed I was right, and I'm right now, so here I am."
In noisy small-town auditoriums, Coon argued that in view of congressional reluctance to pay for John Day, his bill was the only way to get it. Neuberger argued that no matter how long it took to get the dam, private utilities should not get the profits. Said he: "It isn't a partnership when one of the partners is allowed to swallow the other . . . I wouldn't care who owned General Motors if I could just have all the autos that come off the production line for the next 50 years."