Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

to be our big customers couldn’t afford to pay. And the City of Tucson which was
going to be our largest single municipal customer couldn’t pay. And the federal
government was fining us twenty-eight thousand dollars a day for the canal. And
I’m sitting President. I remember in that era thinking why on earth did I run for
this This is just a colossal pain and I’m not being paid to deal with this.
So we set about slowly trying to deal with each one of those problems. The
solution to the farmer problem was this target pricing scheme that allowed us to
get the farmers back up to purchasing much more of the water by bringing the
price way down, by getting the cities to agree to do it and getting [the farmers] to
surrender their long term rights to water to make it more like a spot market
commodity from year to year. The solution to the Tucson problem took a long
time. It’s still playing out. They started firing water directors left and right. They
had referendum. They had scandal after scandal. They finally are back to using
a fair amount of water but we had to, again we had to bring the price of the water
down to cushion the shock and try to work with them. And the federal thing, lead
to, ultimately to our big lawsuit against the federal government, which is an hour
talk in of itself. I use to know all the numbers, but I don’t remember all of them
anymore. Basically when we realized this twenty-eight thousand dollars a day
penalty thing and this billion dollar problem we said to the federal government we
need to try to resolve this. We don’t think we owe as much as you think we owe.
And the federal government basically said well yes, that may be true, but what
we really care about… And in the scheme of the federal government a billion
Interview with Grady Gammage
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