That Dam Senator
A River Ran Through Him
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

“The dam is a con.”

-- Jake Gittes, Chinatown

As any fan of the movie Chinatown knows, in the American West one commodity reigns supreme. Not oil or timber, not gold or silicon chips, but water which flows its glistening way through the body politic, providing nourishment for corruption.

The latest politician caught in a crooked water grab is Colorado’s Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the Harley-riding former Democrat who jumped the divide to the Republicans in the wake of the 1994 elections. The move didn’t surprise observers who had followed Campbell’s career. The senator had modeled himself after Wayne Aspinall, an anti-environmental congressman from western Colorado who orchestrated the spasm of dam-building, mining, and logging in the West in the late 1950s and 1960s. Campbell shared Aspinall’s vision, but he’s never exhibited his grandiose malignity. Campbell’s politics have rarely risen above the petty and the personal.

In the summer of 1998, Campbell concocted a bill to transfer the federally-owned Vallecitos reservoir and dam, located in southern Colorado near Durango, to the privately-owned Pine River Irrigation District. As originally devised, the legislation would have sold the federal property to the ranching and development group for only $492,000, far below its market value. But by the time the bill had moved out of Campbell’s committee, even that small sum had been excised and both the reservoir and the dam were offered on behalf of we-the-people to the Pine River organization for free. In a speech on the Senate floor, Campbell said the transfer was needed in order to give citizens “local control” over their water supplies. The bill flew through the Senate unanimously on a voice vote on October 8, 1998, but stalled when the Congress adjourned before the House could take up the legislation.

LINK TO CON.