Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

wanted to get. Until the cities grew, we wouldn’t need it. We’d sell it to the
farmers and they’d take every drop of water we could give them. So they signed
up, when I say they, the farmers really signed up through the mechanisms of
irrigation districts which are their entities for receiving delivery of water and then
distributing it. The irrigation districts, the biggest ones were the MSIDD,
(Maricopa-Stanfield Irrigation and Drainage District) and CAIDD (Central Arizona
Irrigation and Drainage District). These are Pinal County farming districts. They
signed up under a mechanism that’s come to be called “take or pay”. And what it
said is to the extent that there’s water left over that nobody is using you guys will
guarantee that you’ll buy it all and you’ll pay for it whether you use it or not. Now
it makes no sense to call it “take or pay” because that would imply that you either
take it or pay for it. This was you pay for it, period, no matter what.
The problem was that there had been a whole series of really bad assumptions
made. The first set of bad assumptions had been how much the canal was going
to cost. I can’t remember the numbers anymore, but originally the canal was
supposed to cost like eight hundred million dollars. Now this is a federal project;
they don’t do things on budget. It got more and more and more expensive. The
way Arizona had signed up, you remember Carter and the hit list, you’ve got
people talking about this that know far more about it than I do, but the way
Arizonans signed up is we created the Central Arizona Water Conservation
District to pay for the State share of the canal. We don’t as a State have to pay
for the water that used to go to the Indians. That’s a federal obligation. So the
Interview with Grady Gammage
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