Valley of Debt

On February 6, a group of Congressmen and their friends, calling itself the Mississippi Valley Association, will meet in St. Louis and plot out their annual campaign against a Missouri Valley Authority. They will moan, as they have been doing for the last five years, about the dangers of "government socialism encroaching on our rivers."

The Congressmen are scheduled to hear speeches by a man named Pick and another named Sloan, both of whom are well acquainted with the Missouri. Mr. Sloan works for the Bureau of Reclamation, and is building irrigation dams up and down the river; General Pick is an Army Engineer, and his project is giving the Missouri a nine-foot navigable channel.

Ten years ago, Pick and Sloan were pretty incompatible. Sloan would put up a dam, and Pick would reply with another which submerged it. After a few years of this, the two men smelled a good thing, joined forces and got Congress to appropriate them funds which have so far totalled more than a billion dollars. At the present time, Pick and Sloan are putting up levees and dams, and digging ditches along more than 2000 miles of their river.

They are indulging in one of the greatest wastes of public funds in the history of our country. The Hoover commission and some other responsible people have pointed out that Pick and Sloan are (1) planning their projects for twice as much water as exists in the entire river, (2) doing nothing about the thousands of acres of farmland which wash down the Missouri each year, (3) wasting millions of dollars by hiring out their projects to contractors instead of building things themselves, and (4) allocating millions to the development of navigation when commerce on the river is negligible. On top of all this, their administrative set-up is so complicated that they are probably still working on projects which will cancel each other out; it took a St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial writer two years and a large amount of money to figure out just what they were doing.

Congress will probably get a bill this season for formation of a Missouri Valley Authority, for an organization which can worry about flood control and irrigation at the same time, and end the incredible overlapping, inefficiency, and boondoggling of Pick-Sloan. The only people hurt by MVA will be a few manufactures who like to ship by water and the many contractors who are cleaning up on the present plan. If these men can be headed off and MVA finally approved, the country stands to save a few billion dollars.