The Horse Heaven Irrigation Scheme
A Paterson landowner warns of a massive bond election, citing conflicts of interest and a lack of reliable engineering data.
Permit me the use of your paper to briefly discuss the bond election on June 16th, to vote bonds for bonding the Horse Heaven Irrigation district in the sum of $18,000,000. It is at this time inadvisable to vote bonds, and every voter should come out and vote against the bond issue now. The board of directors has spent thousands of dollars on a report from three engineers—Mr. Thompson of Seattle, Mr. Wiley of Boise, and Mr. Laurgaard of Portland—but their findings are worthless because they are based entirely on surveys and data furnished by Mr. Rice, one of the organizers of the Klickitat Irrigation Power company. This company is engineering a deal to sell its supposed water rights to the district for $200,000 to $250,000. Mr. Kelso, a director of the district, is also a stockholder in the Klickitat company and a fierce advocate for this purchase. To vote these bonds means to put $18,000,000 worth of negotiable bonds into the hands of three men, creating a first lien on every acre of ground in the district. The Washington Irrigation district law does not throw sufficient protection around the sale of these bonds. We must vote them down.
“To vote these bonds means to put in the hands of three men $18,000,000 worth of negotiable bonds... and the only protection the land owners have is the integrity of directors.”
This 1917 letter to the editor captures a classic Washington civic struggle: the tension between large-scale land development projects and the local landowners who fear being saddled with the debt. The skepticism toward 'expert' reports based on self-interested data remains a recurring theme in modern regional planning and utility governance.
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