Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

the notice of completion. The notice of completion tripped a bunch of obligations.
Up until the notice of completion we’d been able to sell water for kind of whatever
price we wanted. So prior to the notice of completion we were selling half a
million or more acre feet of water a year to farmers. As soon as he issued the
notice of completion we now had to sell at a formulaic price designed to pay back
the cost of building the canal. If we sold it to a city we had to pay it with 3.2
percent interest, if we sold it to a farmer we had to pay the share of building the
canal but not the interest. That resulted in the Bureau of Reclamation calculating
how much we owed and they’d send us these bills. So then I get elected
President of the Board. The Staff is saying you know we think they’re billing us
for too much. We think they’re charging us way more than under this SCRB
formula they should be allowed to charge us. And they were wanting to charge, I
don’t remember the exact numbers, but we were essentially a nine hundred
million dollar difference in what they thought we should pay and what we thought
we should pay. So they’d send us these monthly bills and we’d started sending
them what we thought we should pay and there was a difference. So, now I’m
President of the Board and the Secretary of the Interior, my old friend Bruce
Babbitt starts sending us past due notices and accumulating penalties at the rate
of twenty-eight thousand dollars a day. And I’m President of this thing and we’re
running these twenty-eight thousand dollars a day penalties and it made me
extremely nervous. So that was the first crisis that hit.
Interview with Grady Gammage
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