Big Dam Agency to Focus on Environment

The 85-year-old federal Bureau of Reclamation, facing the end of the era in which big dams are being built in the West, announced Thursday that it will focus on water cleanup and conservation in a reorganization that could cut its 8,000-member staff in half by 1998.

“The bureau largely has accomplished the job for which Congress created it in 1902--namely, to reclaim the arid West,” said James W. Ziglar, assistant secretary of the Interior for water and science.

Outlining moves that will shift the bureau’s headquarters from here to Denver, Ziglar said that the agency is “changing its primary mission as a developer of water projects in the West to that of a water resource management agency.”

The Bureau of Reclamation is best known for its great dams and power plants, including the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River and the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.

May Give Up Valley Project

The bureau also operates the Central Valley Project in California, a massive system largely devoted to supplying subsidized irrigation water to farmers. As part of the reorganization, it was learned, the federal agency is negotiating a state takeover of the system, a move that could help the Metropolitan Water District obtain more water for Los Angeles, sources said.

Ziglar said that congressional reaction to the proposed changes had been “very favorable.” He said that the plan, which takes effect Jan. 1, envisions a 10% cut in personnel by 1989, 25% by 1992 and 50% by 1998 “if there are no new initiatives.” Most reductions are expected to come through attrition or early retirement.

An aide to a key Western congressman said that the bureau had “finally awakened to the fact that its dam-building mission is over and, unless it looked for new tasks, it would be out of business.” The aide, requesting anonymity, added that “the bureau talks about taking a new direction without offering any details.”

In a report to Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel, Ziglar noted that Congress had not authorized any new water projects for the bureau since 1968 and that the bureau’s primary construction business now is to finish the Central Arizona and Central Utah projects and to repair unsafe dams.

“Major agricultural water and power projects are becoming increasingly difficult to justify from an economic, budgetary and environmental perspective,” the report said. The bureau should put more emphasis on water conservation, environmental protection and improved water management practices, it added.

“Groundwater management will be one of the hottest issues of the next decade,” Ziglar told reporters. “There is no better organization to deal with it than the Bureau of Reclamation.”