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"SEC. 14. This act shall be deemed a supplement to the reclamation law, which said reclamation law shall govern the construction, operation, and management of the works herein authorized, except as otherwise herein provided."

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Your first question is as follows:

"Whether or not advances from the General Treasury to the Colorado River Dam Fund for construction costs of the All-American Canal, and disbursements from the Colorado River Dam Fund for that purpose, should be interestbearing."

The All-American Canal is one of the works which the Secretary of the Interior is authorized to construct under section 1 of the Act, being therein described as "a main canal and appurtenant structures located entirely within the United States connecting the Laguna Dam [near the Mexican boundary], * * * with the Imperial and Coachella Valleys in California." The other physical constructions thereby authorized are "a dam and incidental works at Black Canyon or Boulder Canyon" and a power plant at or near that dam. Section 1 recites the purposes of these constructions as controlling the floods, improving navigation and regulating the flow of the Colorado River, providing for storage and for the delivery of the stored waters thereof for reclamation of public lands and other beneficial uses, and for the generation of electrical energy as a means of making the project a self-supporting and financially solvent undertaking.

The "Colorado River Dam Fund," to which your question relates, is established by section 2 (a) of the Act as a special fund to be available only for carrying out the provisions of the Act. It is further provided that “ revenues received in carrying out the provisions of this Act shall be paid into and expenditures shall be made out of the fund, under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior." It is thus apparent that a single fund is provided into which and

out of which all receipts and disbursements connected with any phase of the project must flow, regardless of source. By section 2 (b) the Secretary of the Treasury is authorized to advance to the fund, from time to time and within the appropriations therefor, such amounts not exceeding $165,000,000, as the Secretary of the Interior deems necessary.

Section 2 (b) further provides:

"Interest at the rate of 4 per centum per annum accruing during the year upon the amounts so advanced and remaining unpaid shall be paid annually out of the fund, except as herein otherwise provided."

The question is, therefore, whether the Act should be construed as providing that interest is not to be paid on moneys advanced to the fund for the cost of construction of the All-American Canal.

The Act nowhere so provides in express terms, and there are provisions in section 2 relating to the fund which, taken literally, would require that all moneys advanced by the Treasury for any part of the authorized project should bear interest. By section 2 (d) the Secretary of the Treasury is directed to charge the fund as of June 30 in each year “ with such amount as may be necessary for the payment of interest on advances made under subdivision (b) at the rate of 4 per centum per annum accrued during the year upon the amounts so advanced and remaining unpaid, except that if the fund is insufficient to meet the payment of interest the Secretary of the Treasury may, in his discretion, defer any part of such payment, and the amount so deferred shall bear interest at the rate of 4 per centum per annum until paid." It may be suggested that the phrase "except as herein otherwise provided" in section 2 (b) should be deemed to refer only to the exception with respect to the deferment of interest provided in section 2 (d), just quoted. The references in section 2 (c) to "the payment of interest, during construction, upon the amounts so advanced," and in section 2 (e) to "payment of interest," are not expressly qualified. An inference that all sums advanced from the Treasury for any part of the project are to be interest-bearing may also be drawn from the reference in section 5 to "the repay

ments to the United States of all money advanced with interest" and the provision of section 7 that the Secretary of the Interior may, in his discretion, "when repayments to the United States of all money advanced, with interest, reimbursable hereunder, shall have been made, transfer the title" to the said canal and appurtenant structures, with certain exceptions, to the districts or other agencies of the United States having a beneficial interest therein.

On the other hand, there are other provisions of the Act which provide an entirely different plan of reimbursement of expenditures for the canal and appurtenant structures than those which govern the reimbursement of the cost of the dam and power project. Section 1 provides that "the expenditures for said main canal and appurtenant structures [are] to be reimbursable, as provided in the reclamation law, and shall not be paid out of revenues derived from the sale or disposal of water power or electric energy at the dam authorized to be constructed at said Black Canyon or Boulder Canyon, or for water for potable purposes outside of the Imperial and Coachella Valleys." No such provision is made with respect to the dam or power plant, and it is manifest from the Act as a whole that the expenditures for their construction are to be paid mainly, if not wholly, from those revenues which were excluded as a source of reimbursement of expenditures for the canal. In section 4 (b), which requires the Secretary of the Interior to make certain provisions for revenues before any money is appropriated for the construction of the works comprised in the project or any construction work is done thereon, the dam and power plant and the main canal and appurtenant structures are treated in separate paragraphs, which differ materially in their provisions. The first paragraph, dealing with the dam and power plant, requires that the Secretary make provision for revenues, adequate in his judgment to insure, among other things, "the repayment, within fifty years from the date of the completion of said works, of all amounts advanced to the fund under subdivision (b) of section 2 for such works, together with interest thereon made reimbursable under this Act;" whereas in the second paragraph, dealing with the main canal and appurtenant structures, the requirement is that

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he shall make provision for revenues adequate in his judgment "to insure payment of all expenses of construction, operation, and maintenance of said main canal and appurtenant structures in the manner provided in the reclamation law "; and interest is not mentioned.

Thus, while the dam and reservoir were to provide for the storage of waters for the purpose of reclamation of public lands as well as for flood control, improvement of navigation, generation of electrical energy, and the other purposes recited in section 1, the main canal was singled out and treated as a purely reclamation project, the expenditures for which were to be reimbursable in the same manner as those for other projects administered under the reclamation law.

The reclamation law is defined by section 12 as meaning the Act of June 17, 1902 (c. 1093, 32 Stat. 388), and the Acts amendatory thereof and supplemental thereto. The plan set forth in those Acts, so far as here material, is as follows: By section 1 of the Act of June 17, 1902, a special fund was created in the Treasury known as the "reclamation fund," consisting of moneys received from the disposal of public lands in certain States and certain fees and commissions; other sources of revenue were added by supplemental Acts. The moneys in this fund are used for the construction of irrigation projects which the Secretary of the Interior determines to be practicable, and the fund is then reimbursed by charges made upon the lands designated by the Secretary by public notice as irrigable under the project, whether held by entrymen or in private ownership. Those charges are to be determined "with a view of returning to the reclamation fund the estimated cost of construction of the project," and are to be apportioned equitably (id., secs. 2, 3, 4, and 5; see also Act of August 13, 1914, 38 Stat. 690; Act of December 5, 1924, sec. 4, 43 Stat. 702) By the Act of May 25, 1926, section 46 (44 Stat. 649), no water is to be delivered upon the completion of the project until contracts approved by the Secretary shall have been made with irrigation districts providing for the payment, among other things," of the cost of constructing" the works in not more than forty years from the date of the public notice. The reclamation fund is thus a permanent revolving fund,

created in the first instance by an appropriation of public moneys and used for the financing of reclamation projects.

This fund is not to be used for the works authorized by the Boulder Canyon Project Act, which are financed instead through the Colorado River dam fund created by section 2, and that Act contemplates (see secs. 5 and 9) that revenues received under the reclamation law in connection with this project are to be covered into that fund. The provisions of section 9, however, closely parallel those of the reclamation law, and the references in sections 1 and 4 (b) to the reimbursement of the cost of construction of the main canal and appurtenant structures in the manner provided by the reclamation law manifestly refer to the charging of the cost of construction upon the lands benefited as therein described. The reclamation law contains no provision for the payment by the land owners of any interest upon the sums advanced from the reclamation fund, and I am advised that the term "construction charge " as used in the reclamation law has never been construed by the Interior Department as including an interest charge upon the cost of construction. Congress must be deemed to have been familiar with the reclamation law, to which frequent references are made in the Act, and with the practical interpretation thereof by the Interior Department as not authorizing the charging of interest upon the cost of construction of a reclamation project against the lands benefited thereby. In this view, the omission of any mention of interest in the second paragraph of section 4 (b), in contradistinction to the express mention thereof in the first paragraph, is significant, and strongly indicative of an intention of Congress that interest upon the construction cost of the All-American Canal should not be charged against lands benefited.

If interest is not to be charged against the land, the Act designates no source of revenue from which interest might be paid to the General Treasury upon sums advanced for the construction costs of the canal. Section 1 explicitly provides that the expenditures for the canal shall not be paid out of revenues from the sale or disposal of water power or electric energy at the dam or for water for potable purposes outside of the Imperial and Coachella Valleys. It is reasonable to presume that, since Congress forbade the use

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