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Show Modified River Project Approved At Denver Rfieet The four Upper Basin states' political leaders Tuesday came up with a modified Upper Colorado I River Storage project that will be presented to congress next year, as they met at Denver in a special meeting to iron out local difficulties difficul-ties and try to present a bill that would meet the favor of congress. In setting up their six-point plan, leaders from Utah, Colorado New Mexico and Wyoming rejected reject-ed Colorado's governor, Edwin C. Johnson's "one-shot" proposal that only Glen Canyon Dam, on the Utah-Colorado border, be built at this time. Echo Park Dropped The four-state agreement also sounded an end to attempts to get a dam built at. Echo Park, near the Utah-Colorado border. Basically, the plan adopted Tuesday Tues-day at a day-long meeting of senators, sen-ators, congressmen, governors and water experts of the four states did the following: 1. Endorsed as initial storage projects the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, the Flaming Gorge Dam in Utah, the Curecanti in Colorado and the Navajo (dam and reservoir only) in New Mexico. 2 Endorsed the 11 participating projects and the 18 contingent projects now contained in the $760 million House bill. 3. Agreed to eliminate irrigation features of the Navajo-South San Juan project and divert power revenue of this project 'into repayment repay-ment of other features of the overall project. The irrigation part of this project would be built by the U S. government under a federal fed-eral Indian grant, since the land to be irrigated lies entirely on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Special Cimmittee 4. Set up a special' committee to work out a formula for the construction of the participating projects. Members of the committee commit-tee included Sens. Clinto P. Anderson Ander-son (D-N.M.), chairman; Sen. Arthur Ar-thur V. Watkins (R-Utah), Sen. Joseph C. O'Mahoney (D-Wyo.), Sen. Eugene D. Millikin (R-Colo.), and Ival Goslin, secretary to the Upper Colorado River Commission. 5. Agreed there would be no attempt at-tempt from the Upper Basin to try to get Echo Park Dam included, includ-ed, by amendment or any other means, as one of the major projects proj-ects of the dam. Rejects Proposal 6. Rejected Gov. Johnson's proposal pro-posal that only Glen Canyon be built and the power revenues from this project be divided among the four states to be used to construct participating projects. Sen. Anderson . estimated that the new program, if it can gain general approval in the Upper Basin Bas-in states, would cost about $500 million and should stand a "very good" chance of gaining approval. (Continued on Back Page) UPPER COLORADO RIVER . . . (Continued from page one) this year. Only major leaders who must be won over to this project will be Gov. Johnson and Rep. Wayne Aspinall (D-Colo.), second ranking Democrat on the House Interior Committee. Governor Johnson was not present pres-ent at the meeting at the time the agreement was reached. Representative Rep-resentative Aspinall was in the Pacific Northwest with other members mem-bers of the Interior Committee checking into details of the controversial con-troversial Hells Canyon project on the Idaho-Oregon border. Senator Anderson said he believed be-lieved that elimination of the Navajo Nav-ajo irrigation project, at a savings of some $160 million, would answer the charge of Governor Johnson that Colorado was not getting a fair share of the project. This would be true, he said, especially since Colorado would get the largest larg-est share of the power revenues formerly allocated to the Navajo project. The new plan also should sil-'ence sil-'ence the opposition of the powerful power-ful Council of Conservationists, who battled the river development project on grounds that a dam at Echo Park would invade a national monument. In fact, Howard Zahnister, Washington representative of the council, indicated Wednesday that the group would not oppose the new river plan "if it can be proved this is a sound, economical development." devel-opment." . Their opposition on conservation grounds will be dropped as soon as it is certain Echo Park will not be included, Mr." Zahnister indi-I indi-I cated. |