Editing Columbia Basin Project (section)

==History==

{{more citations needed|section|date=July 2013}}

The [[U.S. Bureau of Reclamation]] was created in 1902 to aid development of dry western states. Central Washington's [[Columbia Plateau]] was a prime candidate&mdash;a desert with fertile [[loess]] soil and the [[Columbia River]] passing through.

Competing groups lobbied for different irrigation projects; a [[Spokane, Washington|Spokane]] group wanted a {{convert|134|mi|km}} gravity flow canal from [[Lake Pend Oreille]] while a [[Wenatchee, Washington|Wenatchee]] group (further south) wanted a large dam on the Columbia River, which would pump water up to fill the nearby [[Grand Coulee]], a formerly-dry canyon-like [[coulee]].

After thirteen years of debate, President [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] authorized the dam project with [[National Industrial Recovery Act]] money.  (It was later specifically authorized by the [[Rivers and Harbors Act]] of 1935, and then reauthorized by the [[Columbia Basin Project Act]] of 1943 which put it under the [[Reclamation Project Act]] of 1939.)<ref name="usbr.gov"/> Construction of Grand Coulee Dam began in 1933 and was completed in 1942. Its main purpose of pumping water for irrigation was postponed during [[World War II]] in favor of electrical power generation that was used for the war effort. Additional [[hydroelectric]] generating capacity was added into the 1970s. The Columbia River [[reservoir (water)|reservoir]] behind the dam was named [[Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake]] in honor of the president. The irrigation holding reservoir in Grand Coulee was named [[Banks Lake]].

After World War II the project suffered a number of setbacks. Irrigation water began to arrive between 1948 and 1952, but the costs escalated, resulting in the original plan, in which the people receiving irrigation water would pay back the costs of the project over time, being repeatedly revised and becoming a permanent water subsidy. In addition, the original vision of a social engineering project intended to help farmers settle on small landholdings failed. Farm plots, at first restricted in size, became larger and soon became corporate agribusiness operations.<ref name=75years/>

The original plan was that a federal agency similar to the [[Tennessee Valley Authority]] would manage the entire system. Instead, conflicts between the Bureau of Reclamation and the [[United States Department of Agriculture|Department of Agriculture]] thwarted the goal of both agencies of settling the project area with small family farms; larger corporate farms arose instead.<ref name=75years/>

The determination to finish the project's plan to irrigate the full {{convert|1100000|acre|km2}} waned during the 1960s. The estimated total cost for completing the project had more than doubled between 1940 and 1964, it had become clear that the government's financial investment would not be recovered, and that the benefits of the project were unevenly distributed and increasingly going to larger businesses and corporations. These issues and others dampened enthusiasm for the project, although the exact motives behind the decision to stop construction with the project about half finished are not known.<ref name=75years/>