The Bureaucratic Standoff Over Yakima Water
State Land Commissioner S. A. Calvert returns from D.C. after hitting a wall with the Interior Department over irrigation rights.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
OLYMPIA, Dec. 5.—State Land Commissioner S. A. Calvert has returned from Washington, D. C., where he went for the purpose of laying before the interior department the application on behalf of the state for the selection of arid lands in Yakima county, under the terms of the Cary act, the land being that to be watered by the proposed extension of the Sunnyside irrigation canal. The whole matter, under the rules of the department, was hung up for thirty days, at which time some further showing will be made concerning the sufficiency of the company's intake at the head of its ditch. At the same time the protests will be considered which have been filed in the case. It is stated that nothing has as yet been furnished the department in support of these protests, which consist of the representations that another company claims to be able to water a much larger area of arid land if the state should grant it a contract. No surveys or plans have been filed in support of this claim, and unless something of this kind is done within the next thirty days, the protests can have little or no effect.
“The whole matter, under the rules of the department, was hung up for thirty days.”
The control of water rights in the Yakima Valley has been a defining civic and economic struggle for over a century. The tension between irrigation development and bureaucratic hurdles at the federal level remains a central theme in Washington State resource management.
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