The Reclamation Act of 1902, as amended, is the basic
legislation governing the distribution of water from federal
projects for irrigation purposes. In the three-quarters
of a century since the passage of this Act, technological,
economic, and legal developments have forced a reappraisal
of the original intent of the Reclamation laws.
Several proposals have been made to amend these laws
and enforce provisions that put the current distribution
of the rights to public water and related land resources
in jeopardy. This study attempts to evaluate these proposed
amendments in terms of the irrigation rights that
would be displaced if the amendments were rigidly enforced
in three of Oregon's largest federal irrigation
districts.
The method of analysis proceeds by combining secondary
data on land ownership with primary survey data
on leasing arrangements to generate a distribution of
farm sizes for each district. Each farming unit as a
whole is then evaluated for any excess acreage that would
be displaced from applying the ownership, leasing, and
residency provisions of each of the proposals. Excess
acreage is summed and extrapolated over the irrigation
district to provide an estimate of the effect of enforcing
each proposal in each district.
The results of the analysis indicate that the various
proposed restrictions will result in widely different
sets of effects. Two of the proposals, that of the Department
of Interior and that of National Land for People,
are restrictive enough to cause 17,000 and 23,000 acres of
excess land, respectively, across all three irrigation
districts. The other two proposals analyzed, that of
Senators Church/Hatfield, and that of Farm/Water Alliance,
will result in little or no excess land in these districts. / Graduation date: 1980
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/26704 |
| Date | 06 December 1979 |
| Creators | Spies, Paul Andrew |
| Contributors | Stoevener, Herbert H. |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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