President Carter has said he will decide by April 15 on ultimate recommendations on funding for 19 water projects – and it is hoped he will be guided by common sense and the needs of the people involved. In the case of the Bonneville Unit, Central Utah Project, whose funds would be slashed under Carterls original edict, Utahns have presented a solid case for funding the project in hearings in Salt Lake City and in testimony in Washington. Meantime, with disclosure by journalists on how the original water project demolition list was developed, one wonders to what extent common sense prevailed in this procedure. Walter Pincus, Washington Post writer, charged in a copyrighted column in the Salt Lake Tribune that a preliminary list of such projects was prepared at the outset by two young staff members sympathetic to the arguments of conservationists’Katherine Schirmer and Katherine Fletcher, the latter an ex-employee of the Environmental Defense Fund. Said Pincus; “Schirmer headed the Interior Department transition team and Fletcher worked with her. The team put together what Schirmer. calls a ‘preliminary list’ of projects under construction that the team felt should be halted. “The list, naming 61 projects, was published Jan. 1 and sent a shudder through the Corps of Engineers. No one on Capitol I-lill took it seriously.” The columnist recounted t.hat after Carter’s inauguration Jan. 20, Schirmer joined the White House Domestic Council staff and brought Fletcher with ber. I-le went on to claim that the two canvassed within the Office of Management and Budget and the President’s Council on Environmental Quality to gather ammunition against the projects.” Another Washington joumallst, Helene Monberg, writing for Westem Resources Wrap-Up, told how Fletcher stunned a group of water professionals in the week of March 10 by giving them a new list of reclamation projects endangered by a Carter Administration fund cutoff. Her list was in addition to the initial list of 19 ongoing water projects – 8 reclamation and 11 Corps of Engineer projects targeted for fund deletions for fiscal ’78. “Kathy stunned us. We sat there watching a 25-year-old girl dismantle federal water programs before our eyes. It was incredible,” John Rlosholt of Twin Falls, Idaho, president of the National Water Resources Association, was quoted by reporter Monberg as saying. There was more to the story, of course – criteria established, studies run. But it does seem incredible, if the Washington accounts are true, that so much power was placed in the hands of young bureaucrats, especially when senators and congressmen from the states involved weren’t even consulted before the original Carter fund-cut announcement. It also seems incredible that one Washington administration can presume to ignore commitments of those who have gone before (for example five federal administrations have backed the Bonneville Unit since Congress first approved the CUP in 1956). A further question: Would it make sense to stop a project under way for 11 years with around $200 million already invested? Especially when over 90 per cent of the money is to be returned to the federal treasury by water users under the repayment contract. This is no govemment handout by any means. Another: Can a repayment contract voted by the people of counties involved (as with the CUP) be legally nullified by a unilateral action of a new administration? Water is the life blood of an arid state like Utah. It is hoped President Carter, in the light of massive support data presented in the past several weeks, will act now to reverse his former stand on the Bonneville Unit by recommending full funding. Such action could head off a fight with Congress on the issue, which apparently is in store If the President sticks with his original stand.