CONSERVATION: Dam Suit

Beaten in Congress, angry Arizona last week began in the U. S. Supreme Court a final attack upon Boulder Dam* The court allowed the State, through K. Berry Peterson, its attorney general, to bring suit against California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur in an attempt to have the Colorado River Compact and the Boulder Canyon Project Act declared unconstitutional.

The defendants must respond to the suit by Jan. 5.

Arizona’s filibuster could not beat the Boulder Dam bill in the Senate. Its pleas for a veto were ignored. Last week’s suit released all its pent-up legalistic fury against what it considers a rape of its sovereign rights and resources.

In his brief to the Court, Attorney General Peterson listed Arizona’s chief objections:

1) The Colorado River Compact which apportions water among the seven States is “grossly inequitable, unjust and unfair” to Arizona which never ratified it. Its effect would be to leave 2,000,000 Arizona acres “forever unirrigated, uncultivated, uninhabited, unused.”

2) Arizona citizens could get water from the reservoir only upon payment of such charges as the Secretary of the Interior fixed, whereas California citizens in the Imperial and Coachella valleys would get water free.

3) The contention that the project would improve navigation is “a mere subterfuge and false pretense” because the Colorado is not navigable nor would a dam make it so.

4) The construction of a dam on its land without its permission is a violation of Arizona law.

5) Arizona would lose tax revenue on the power produced at the dam.

Arizona’s suit, on a par in importance with the Great Lakes diversion controversy (TIME, Nov. 22, 1926, et seq.), did not cause the U. S. to delay its construction plans. Declared President Hoover: “The letting of contracts . . . will proceed as rapidly as possible. The determination of the points of law raised by Arizona will be expedited. … In the meantime I am in hopes that the States may get together and compose their differences.”

Secretary Wilbur last week contracted to buy $1,730,000 worth of electricity from the Southern Sierras Power Company, to be used during the period of construction at the dam site.

*Though Secretary of the Interior Wilbur renamed this work the Hoover Dam (TIME, Sept. 29), its legal title remains fixed by the Boulder Canyon Project Act. Newsmen and headline writers have been slow to accept Secretary Wilbur’s change.