The Waterbury Democrat., 1945-07-24

 lines are being drawn now for these fights.
 It must be understood, of course, that there is a strong lobby support ing MVA, but it is not as old and not as experienced and not as well co-ordinated as the water users lob- by in opposition. Included in the pro-MVA are the National Farmers Union of tenant farmers and small landholders, the A. F. of L., the C.. I. O., the public power advocates, the supporters of the Tennessee Valley Authority who endlessly sing its praises as "the perfect state" ]" and a number of new civic organiz- ations recently formed in St. Louis and the Missouri basin. In early July they all met at Omaha, form ed the Missouri Valley Regional Committee for MVA and started out to get million signatures on a petition for Congress to create an MVA.
 2 MVA, however, isn't the only tar- get which the 31 organizations in the water lobby are spouting at. There are four other bills to create other authorities pending before Congress. The water lobby wants to drown them all.
 RANKIN WANTS NINE AUTHORITIES
 Most ambitious of the other au- thority proposals is Mississippi Con- T@I Da| i,.,s I>i1 &A vide the whole United States into nine areas and put an authority over each one - Atlantic Seaboard east of the Alleghenies, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, Missouri, Colum- bia, Arkansas and Colorado valleys, Southwestern Authority and Cali fornia Authority to function west of the Sierras. It is admittedly too far reaching to have much chance.
 Washington Senator Hugh B. Mitchell proposes a Columbia Val ley Authority for the three north western states and 8 bit of Canada.
 Ohio Congressman Bob Bender proposes an Ohio Valley Authority to cover most of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia, with bites into west Pennsylvania, north Tennessee, southeast Illinois.
 South Carolina Congressman Butler B. Hare proposes a Savan- nah Valley Authority, taking in nar- row strips on the Carolina Georgia line.
 But these five bills by no means represent all the valley authority thinking and planning being done in Washington.
 Interior Departments Bureau of Reclamation has studies under way to divide the entire west roughly, everything west of Kansas City =, into some 20 valley developments: Rio Grande, Red, Arkansas, Color ado, Columbia, Central, Missouri and so on.
 Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes naturally wants control of all these 20 valleys kept in his Bureau of Re- clamation.
 THE LOBBY
 LIKES ICKES' PLAN
 In fact, Ickes has a Missouri Val- ley plan of his own worked out. And the 3l organizations making up the water lobby have seized upon this Bureau of Reclamation plan as the principal reason why no other plan and no MVA is needed to re- place it.
 Army Engineers have traditional ly supervised flood control and nav- igable rivers. Under such an ex- banded valley authority program as is now before Congress, all this supervision over navigable streams would be taken away from the War Department and given to the au- thorities. Army Engineers aren't in- terested in hydro-electric power ex- cept incidentally. When they build 8 dam it's for flood control. And the Engineers have hosts of friends and supporters in states where there are recurrent floods.
 The powerful water lobby, sup- porting both Engineers and Bureau and Reclamation as established old line agencies with whom they are accustomed to do business, is in there fighting to preserve these older government agencies and to skip all this fancy, New Dealish val- ley authority stuff.