Allocated to irrigation and municipal and industrial water supply. No appropriated funds were to be used to build these water projects. The Reclamation Act irrigated the west through a series of dams on waterways, and is considered second in significance only to the Homestead Act of 1862. While the Homestead Act allowed farmers to claim land for agriculture, the Reclamation Act allowed them access to irrigation. In many cases, this irrigation was the only thing that made cultivating the land possible. Roosevelt felt strongly about the welfare of the west, and indicated the importance he placed on helping it flourish in his 1902 message to Congress at the beginning of the second legislative session of the Fifty-seventh Congress.

Collectively, those projects set in motion water withdrawals that eventually invited litigation involving Indian treaty rights, endangered species, and a host of other troubles. Most of the legal fights have centered on the Bureau of Reclamation’s practice of allowing agricultural interests to over-appropriate water from streams. Much of the West could not have been settled without the water provided by the Act.

The purpose of the National Reclamation Act was to “reclaim” the land for agriculture in order to salvage the agrarian roots of the United States. Any funds earned from public land sold in the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Montana, Utah, and about eleven others, would go to the irrigation projects. Congress responded to farmers’ inability to pay water costs first with extended repayment periods, and then a decreased obligation to repay the funds. In 1926, Congress passed the Omnibus Adjustment Act to extend the terms of repayment from ten annual installments to forty annual payments.

Although M&I portions of Reclamation water supply facilities typically require 100% repayment with interest, Congress has authorized providing some or all federal funding for rural water projects on a nonreimbursable basis (i.e., a de facto grant). For example, the federal government pays up to 100% of the cost of tribal rural water supply projects, lightsaber ecig including O&M. For nontribal rural water supply projects, the federal cost share has averaged 75% to 80%. The purpose of the act was to harness the intermittent precipitation in seventeen western states and use it to encourage individual families to settle in the West by converting arid federal land into agriculturally productive land.

Projects authorized under this authority have a different cost-share structure than that used for traditional Reclamation construction and rehabilitation projects . Reclamation first conducts dam safety inspections through the Safety Evaluation of Existing Dams program. Corrective actions, if necessary, are carried out through the Initiate Safety of Dams Corrective Action program. With ISCA appropriations, Reclamation funds modifications on priority structures based on an evolving identification of risks and needs. The federal government initially funds 100% of construction costs, to be repaid by beneficiaries (e.g., irrigation contractors, municipal governments) for their estimated share of a project’s costs, generally over a 40 to 50 year term . In most cases, the federal government is not repaid for its full investment in these projects.55 Beneficiaries also are responsible for paying their share of project-level O&M expenses.

The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Water Conservation Field Services, which provides technical and financial assistance for the development of water conservation plans and design of water management improvements. Reclamation recommends specific projects to receive this funding.

Some may question the prospect of additional federal spending for these projects and contractors. At the same time, infrastructure failures could pose a significant threat to the public in the form of physical and/or economic damages. If Congress chooses to extend the WIIN Act Section 4007 authority, it would signal to some that Reclamation will continue to have an active role in new water development projects. At the same time, it might suggest that this role is likely to be more of a supporting capacity than has traditionally been the case. If Congress opts not to extend the authority, it may choose to focus on other Reclamation mission areas to reduce Reclamation involvement and continue to transition Reclamation projects and responsibilities to nonfederal users. Congress also might decide to complete some projects that have been initially funded through the WIIN Act on an ad hoc basis or to use other financing authorities to support new projects (see below section, “Financing Infrastructure”).

They realized that many water users could not repay construction costs. Initially, Congress, overly optimistic about the construction cost repayments, set a 10-year repayment period. This requirement, however, proved unrealistic, and the limit was raised to 20 years, then 40 years, then finally the vague “ability to repay.” Other financial woes included severe underestimation of construction costs and inflation’s influence on those escalating costs. Since the 1970s, the dam-building fervor has slowed dramatically. The last major authorization for a project occurred in the late 1960s.