Opinion ID: 106627
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: the bearing of other provisions of the project act.

Text: Nothing in the Project Act expressly gives the Secretary power to ignore appropriations so long as financial conditions are met and the Compact and limitations are observed. Senators Hayden and Pittman, as the Court notes, did indicate that § 4 (a) provided for an apportionment of the water, although even they did not suggest that § 4 (a) gave any authority to the Secretary to make an apportionment by his contracts or to allocate the burdens in time of shortage. But in any event, as already noted, pp. 606-607, supra, § 4 does not by its terms make an apportionment; rather it simply requires six-state ratification of the Compact and an agreement by California to limit her share as conditions on the effectiveness of the Act, and authorizes an apportionment by the States themselves. In the words of Senator Johnson, the provision . . . does not divide the water between Arizona and California. It fixes a maximum amount beyond which California can not go. 70 Cong. Rec. 385. Nor does § 6, which requires that the dam be operated for the satisfaction of present perfected rights among other purposes, indicate by negative implication that the Secretary may ignore all other appropriations. This provision was drafted by the Upper Basin States in order to insure that the condition of the Compact had been met to relieve them from the claims of perfected users below. [29] That condition was the construction of an adequate storage reservoir against which those claims could be asserted; the Compact has nothing to do with whether rights perfected under state law since 1929 may be ignored by the Secretary in awarding contracts. Section 8 (b), which subjects the United States and all users of the Project to any compact allocating among the Lower Basin States the benefits, including power, arising from the use of water accruing to said States, and which subjects such an agreement, if made after January 1, 1929, to any delivery contracts made prior to its approval, is similarly no authority for the Court's conclusion. Legislative history is virtually silent as to the reason for giving such contracts precedence, but the provision seems simply to have been intended to promote the entering of contracts by insuring their permanence in accordance with the requirement of § 5. [30] There is no indication in § 8 (b) whether or not the Secretary is free in awarding contracts to ignore existing appropriations; it merely evidences a policy that rights so perfected as to have been reduced to a contract for delivery at a consideration, whatever the basis on which they should be awarded, ought not to be destroyed by a subsequent interstate agreement. If the statute were completely silent as to whether the Secretary may disregard appropriations, the normal inference would be that Congress did not mean to displace existing law. Enough has been said of the statute's history to buttress this inference beyond question. Moreover, the statute is by no means silent on this matter. The references in § 8 (a) and (b) to appropriators of water stored or delivered by the Project, and in § 4 (a) to the taking of steps to initiate or perfect any claims to the use of water made available by the dam, are only the least evidence. [31] Section 14 provides that the Reclamation Act shall govern the operation of Hoover Dam except as the Project Act otherwise provides. Section 8 of the Reclamation Act, 32 Stat. 390, 43 U. S. C. § 383, directs the Secretary of the Interior in carrying out his duties under the Act to proceed in accordance with state and territorial laws and declares that nothing in the federal act shall in any way affect any right of any State or of the Federal Government or of any landowner, appropriator, or user of water in, to, or from any interstate stream or the waters thereof. Both Representative Swing and Senator Johnson emphasized that this provision was deliberately incorporated into the Project Act to safeguard from federal destruction the rights of the States to their shares of the water. [32] This Court made clear in Wyoming v. Colorado, 259 U. S. 419, 463, that by thus protecting the rights of any State in an interstate stream Congress intended to leave untouched the law of interstate equitable apportionment. Ivanhoe Irrig. Dist. v. McCracken, 357 U. S. 275, 291, despite its dictum that § 8 applies only to the acquisition of rights by the United States and not to its operation of a dam, holds only that the clear command of § 5 of the Reclamation Act, 32 Stat. 389, 43 U. S. C. § 431that water deliveries to each user not exceed the quantity required for 160 acresprevails over state law, not that state law does not generally govern priorities in the use of water from federal reclamation projects under § 8. [33] The Court in Ivanhoe expressly stated that it was reaching its narrow conclusion: [w]ithout passing generally on the coverage of § 8 in the delicate area of federal-state relations in the irrigation field . . . . 357 U. S., at 292. This general question, with reference to what is undoubtedly the most important single water project in the United States, is precisely the question before us today. In view of the language of the Project Act, as well as its background and legislative history, there can, I think, be no doubt of the answer.