Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

our side. In the war of western water diplomacy that is worth a lot. That is two
senators. We each have two senators. You’ll never compete in the House with
California but in the Senate it’s a different matter. Of the two senators, Nevada
also had Harry Reid who was not then the Majority Leader but was an important
guy and was becoming more important. The point is Nevada only got 300,000
acre-feet when the river was divided up. Nobody lived there and there weren’t
any farmers. Las Vegas hadn’t boomed at that point. We had enough water to
help Nevada in its circumstance and the scheme was that Nevada pays us to
bank water in Arizona on their behalf. And then in a point in the future when they
need that water, they can just pull it straight out of Lake Mead and we’ll pull up
the water they banked here and use it here. Literally, they just pay us to dump
water in central Arizona. This is a good deal. The problem was it happened right
at the end of my time on the Board. They needed the water earlier than they
thought and they hadn’t banked enough. So we loaned them some. We loaned
them against their future deposits. This is what banks do. This is how it works.
It’s just water instead of money. You’ve got Nevada who may not have much
water but they have a printing press for money. You spin the roulette wheels and
the money comes out. Instead of legalizing gambling in Arizona, we sold them
water and everybody came out fine. It has worked really well I think. It’s been a
very good long-term stable alliance that will be useful to us.
Interview with Grady Gammage
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