(4 of 6)
The Pick-Sloan plan has been the center of many controversies. Individual projects have been questioned and fought over by competing federal agencies, states, localities and private interests. Typical conflicts are:
Big v. Little Dams
The Army Engineers insist that lower basin levee systems must be reinforced by big river flood-control dams, like the $87 million Tuttle Creek project on the Big Blue River north of Manhattan, Kans. Authorized in 1938 as the key unit in the control of the Kansas (Kaw) River Basin, it was blocked for 14 years by angry farmers whose land would be flooded, and who argued instead for a federally financed program of soil conservation (contouring, terracing) and small detention dams on the land to hold the water where it fell. Each year the late Senator Clyde Reed of Kansas knocked the Tuttle Creek item out of the engineers' money bill.
This year, after Kansas' billion-dollar flood of 1951 served notice that the Kansas City area might be inundated again & again until the Kansas and its tributaries were controlled, Congress appropriated $5,000,000 to start Tuttle Creek Dams. Embattled Blue Valley residents still hope to block the project's completion, and their warning that "if Tuttle Creek is built, there is a shadow and threat over every fertile valley in the Missouri Basin" has not gone unnoticed in farmhouses that have been marked for condemnation in other river valleys if the "big dam" principle wins.
Irrigation
Pick-Sloan irrigation projects have been attacked as unpractical, uneconomical and unnecessary—and as vigorously defended. In South Dakota, farmers oppose the 250-mile-long storage reservoir planned for the big Oahe Dam across the Missouri near Pierre (pronounced Peer). Some insist that the reservoir's water will never be used for farming because the easily eroded South Dakota soil is not suitable for irrigation.
Other critics assail the unit cost of irrigation. They say it makes little sense to pay $750 to irrigate an acre when fertile dry land can be bought for $450 an acre. In parts of northeastern Montana, dry-land farmers, who have been getting along satisfactorily, refuse to join new irrigation districts, and so far Pick-Sloan has been able to bring only 12,300 of its planned 5,000,000 new acres into irrigation.
Public v. Private Power
Early in the Pick-Sloan plan, the Montana Power Co. made a determined but unsuccessful effort to prevent the Bureau of Reclamation from building a power-generating station as part of the Canyon Ferry Dam across the Missouri near Helena. Since then, private power companies in the valley have acclimated themselves to a policy of uneasy coexistence with the Government projects. They have been willing to buy electric power wholesale from the Government, but they have been afraid that the Government might use the reclamation projects as steppingstones to the socialization of the valley's electric utility industry.