I am inferring that this charted concentration may not be desirable. I think we would demonstrate it isn't-economically, socially, and maybe even politically. Senator Mundt remarked-about legislation to examine urban-rural balance which he was proposing-that searching studies simply have not been made; he recommended they be made.

Testimony to the Congress by the mayors of large cities, and recent technical writing about the concentration of sources of pollution reveal these implications of this forecasted trend to urban areas: A super-concentration of bulk waste and the pollution of air, water, and land; a hypercongestion of traffic, air, and land; inflation of land costs in urban areas; congestion of outdoor recreation areas; the distance of population masses to the monumental recreational areas; the difficulty of bettering the outlook of underprivileged urban dwellers.

This is a theme which is just coming to get real attention by the people who have been trying to reshape the internal city; they find it is much easier to put in new structures than it is to build in new attitudes.

The vulnerability of metropolitan areas is well known, and you can talk not only about defense, but strike, riot, and many other kinds of things where you have an overconcentration of people, shall also be considered.

The foregoing represents administrative and technical views about cities but what do the urbanites think? A recent Gallup poll showed that 50 percent of this country's citizens want to live in small towns and the open countryside. So said Dr. Weaver himself to the environmental colloquium here last fall.

All of this indicates that a policy concerned with urban-rural balance is desirable, but is it of interest to water resource agencies? Well, the first summary report of the Nation's water resources, late 1968, says, "Water and related land resource development offers one means of countering the trend to overconcentration in urban areas and to correct the deficiencies of underdeveloped areas."

There are not less than five members of the President's Cabinet on that Council, advised by at least two others. So I suggest that means be considered, in evaluating the prospective objectives and benefits of water resource projects, to take into account this urban-rural balance.

Broadening the objectives, not only for urban and rural, but for other aspects we have been discussing here, would, of course, complicate benefit evaluation. But whatever evaluation is used for urbanrural balance, or for providing jobs, or for making waters clean, or for enhancing natural beauty, or for improving areas of recreation in separate programs for all those purposes can as readily be used within a framework for evaluating water resource proposals.

There is no basic reason why, in seeking any of those goals, we have two totally different methods for trying to measure what we get out of a program. Therefore, the framework I suggest would have three groups of benefits. They are indicated below. The items under each group do not comprise any studied segregation at this moment. They are merely trying to give you a sense of these three kinds of things.

Group A, the enhancement of human values. You can scan these items.

Group B, measurable factors, showing the growth and the spread of economic benefits. A good deal of work has been done on this empirically, but no work to try to forecast this kind of thing for new projects. Dr. Peterson's study, up in Washington State University, was one of the first and best on establishing these kinds of growth factors, and a Canadian study established beautifully the spread of benefits.

Group C comprises dollar benefits for the direct uses of water, which you are all acquainted with. Lacking formal recognition of B and A, we have often strained these dollar benefits to overlap into other fields to where the point becomes ridiculous, almost.

These three groups would forecast prospective benefits toward all of the objectives to be served by the water resource proposals.

In summary, group C measures returns in dollars, group B measures progress toward Federal-State objectives other than by direct use of water-we can use a whole series of performance indicators to measure this-and group A is the enhancement of human values.

Those three groups pose a real problem in evaluation. Can it be done? Well, our goals must be expressed in terms of human values, not disciplines of knowledge. "Human values include the right to live in a world that sustains rather than degrades the human spirit," said Wilbur Cohen.

"The quality of our surroundings is emerging as a major national social goal," says Laurance Rockefeller.

"Growing concern has been expressed over the need to incorporate the concept of environmental quality into the decisionmaking process of Government," says our chairman.

So today, when real estate developers get $6,000 to $16,000 for homesites near oversized duck ponds, the human values latent in water resource projects attain new significance. That is a minor example, but of importance considering the vast water areas which reclamation projects have been making available for better living.

The growing sense that solving some urban problems will require new or revitalized rural communities reaches also into the human values latent in water resource proposals. To evaluate the potential of those human values will require a new effort; such an effort was recently recommended to the OWRR, in the Department of the Interior, by a special advisory panel to the Office of Water Resources Research which said:

The panel recommends that concerted attention be given to research which links Federal-State water development to high priority social goals of the Nation. Such attention should include the encouragement of responsive proposals.

That is, the Office shouldn't just sit back, having established the objective; they should go out and get competent people to come in with research proposals.

So, I am hoping that when Interior appears before this committee, the committee will encourage the Office of Water Resources Research to act on the basis of this advice by its advisory panel.

I am also encouraged in this: that the suggested three-way evaluation of resource proposals, and of other conservation projects which can be put in this framework, does merit study both inside and outside of the Federal agencies.

In closing, I would like to borrow a statement which, along with Senator Jackson's views about the quality of environment, I think would be a guide for the evaluation process:

"This Nation's wealth and economic strength depend to a great extent on how we manage and use our natural resources and I would like to suggest that water resource development and better water management be recognized as a national objective with a high priority," said the chairman of our House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee.

Thank you, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Bronn, for a very fine and, I may say, a provocative statement. This is what we need. You have raised, I think, some points here, especially the real gut issue, and that is trying to determine priorities for various national programs. We can't ignore the urban crisis, and this is a direct competitor with the public works programs, both Bureau and the corps, and I must say your elucidation of the relationship here of the urban problem to what we can do in the water area has been a most helpful one to me. Mr. BRONN. Thank you, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. I think it will be very useful for the committee as a whole.

Senator BIBLE. Mr. Chairman, I thoroughly agree with your analysis of this very fine paper. It is provocative. It is going to require some study and analysis, but I think we should compliment Mr. Bronn on doing an unusually good job.

One problem that we face on the Appropriations Committee is the hard, cold fact that although you have a very sympathetic Interior Subcommittee on Appropriations made up very largely of western Senators who know many of our problems of the West, we have great difficulty in securing budget approval. I am wondering what you men have done to try to break that logjam. Do you have any idea what the Bureau of the Budget is doing to recommend as a good funding level for reclamation projects for fiscal year 1970?

Mr. BRONN. I can give you only a piece of an answer.' I have talked, and Mr. Sorensen and I together have talked, with three of the analysts, the working level people in Budget, about a broad concept like this. Now that the NRA Board has accepted this paper, and after we find what questions you have, I will refine it and we will go to the Bureau of the Budget.

Our own Board of Directors, under Mr. Sorensen's leadership, has already determined that we will have an ad hoc group which will attempt to get some of these concepts into the Bureau of the Budget from topside, particularly this interdependence of programs, and the relating of water resources more broadly to other programs.

I have some encouragement in this, also, from inside the staff of the Water Resources Council; if we can work up to the Council, itself, and thus from the agency head back to the Bureau, it will help.

Senator BIBLE. But you have nothing, and I recognize that this is a little early in the session of a new administration to try to find out what figure the Budget people are thinking of, as a level of funding reclamation projects.

If you have a $5 billion backlog, and you are only funding at the rate of $200 million a year, as you say, this is going to take 25 years, without authorizing one single new start. I am wondering where that leads you, and what type of a funding level you recommend. Do you recommend a funding level at any particular figure?

Mr. SORENSEN. Senator Bible, if I might respond, we have had some indication from the new administration that they realize the problem of funding. We have had some indication that they would share our belief that we might look at this program as an investment and, as any investor is liable to do, he is going to reinvest his dividends and whatever money flows from that investment.

If some such concept can be advanced and moved, this would mean that we would probably subsist on some level near the current one, $200 million to $300 million as a direct appropriation, and then work toward some reinvestment of the returns from these projects. This could conceivably get us into the $400 million to $500 million a year level.

Senator BIBLE (presiding). Spell that out. Reinvestment of returns? Wouldn't that get you into political difficulties?

1 The previous administration had recommended a little less than $200 million for construction and reha. bilitation for fiscal year 1970 (earlier statement by Bronn).

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Mr. SORENSEN. I suspect that we would have to, let us say, sell this concept. It is a way in which we believe the focus can be brought to one point, to show the need and a possible way to get there.

Now, when I say that we would reinvest the return

Senator BIBLE. What does that mean?

Mr. SORENSEN. This would be in the nature, conceivably, of a revolving fund. I don't think any of us have in mind that Congress would lose control of authorizations or the actual expenditures on individual projects. This is not what certainly I have in mind in touching on this.

But this would say that there could be a fund which would be called, in a sense, a revolving fund which would be supplemented by direct appropriation.

Senator BIBLE. Where does that money come from that goes into the revolving fund?

Mr. SORENSEN. This would come from repayment, and income from the reclamation projects, from the water development projects themselves. This would, in effect, be the return from the earlier investment which the Congress has made, which the country has made in these projects.

Senator BIBLE. How does that make the Congress whole for a billion dollar expenditure on a project, for example? How does investing it in a revolving fund make the taxpayers of the United States whole for that large an expenditure? How does that come back into the U.S. Treasury?

Mr. SORENSEN. It would not necessarily flow back to the U.S. Treasury as a permanent matter. These funds would come to the Treasury, and would be designated, we will say, or earmarked, as a revolving fund for water development. This would be the income. The repayment from these projects.

Senator BIBLE. From the time of enactment of the reclamation law how many reclamation projects have been authorized by the Congress of the United States? When was that, 1902?

Mr. SORENSEN. That would be right. I don't have that figure. Do you have any idea?

Senator BIBLE. Just a round figure.

Mr. BRONN. I don't know the number of projects, sir, but the total investment in construction is around $5 billion, which is not much more than the current backlog.

Senator BIBLE. From 1902 to date we have funded about $54 billion; is that what you are saying?

Mr. BRONN. That is correct, sir.

Senator BIBLE. In that neighborhood.
Mr. BRONN. Roughly.

Senator BIBLE. How much of the amount that the Congress of the United States has appropriated of the $5% billion has been repaid into the U.S. Treasury?

Mr. SORENSEN. I believe the figure is in the neighborhood of 20 percent, and I would note that of the $5 billion, assuming that figure, a great part of it has come in maybe the last 20 years, just as a rough figure; at least in the latter part of this 65- to 68-year history.

Senator BIBLE. I am rather familiar, as you are, and a lot of the Californians and Colorado people are, with the Hoover Dam, and I think that was roughly a $150 million project. That is presumed to