COLORADO. The State legislature on March 15, 1895, passed an act accepting the provisions of the Carey Act and making provisions for the administration thereof. No applications for segregations under the act were made, however, until in 1903. There have been applications made to date for 21 separate projects in the State; 3 of these applications have been rejected; 5 have been either relinquished or canceled in toto; 7 are pending and 6 have been approved. Of the pending projects 3 are withdrawn under the act of March 15, 1910. At the present time there are withdrawn under the act of March 15, 1910, about 362,331 acres and under prior acts about 65,850 acres, and in the approved segregations there are about 125,540 acres, making the total area involved about 553,721 acres. Following is given a table showing the status of approved Carey Act projects in the State. From this table it will be noted that the first project in the State was started in 1903 and that the major portion of the activity under the act has been during recent years. Out of the 125,540 acres permanently segregated 34,409 have been sold to settlers and only 640 acres have been irrigated under all the projects, amounting to about one-half per cent of the area segregated. The one project that has been completed has an insufficient water supply, and has not had water enough to deliver to the land in it since its completion although its reservoir has been in condition to store water for the last three years. The duty of water for four of the projects is very high and will necessarily result in water shortage whenever there is a smaller run-off than assumed in the designs of the systems. The poor results obtained in Colorado under the Carey Act are due principally to (a) difficulty to obtain responsible promoters; (b) insufficiency of funds of the contracting companies; (c) insufficient and incompetent engineering advice on water supply; (d) the chaotic condition of water rights in the State resulting from a lack of administrative control of water appropriations and adjudications. Status of approved Carey Act projects in Colorado. IDAHO. Under the act of August 18, 1894, Idaho was granted the right to select 1,000,000 acres of land for reclamation under the provisions of the act and was granted an additional area of 1,000,000 acres by each of the special acts of Congress of May 25, 1908, and May 27, 1908, making a total of 3,000,000 acres. In 1895 the State passed a law accepting the conditions of the Carey Act and prescribing the procedure for handling Carey Act projects within the State. This law has been amended by subsequent acts as to procedure for the purpose of more adequately meeting the needs of the State. Idaho has been very active in recent years in Carey Act developments. At the present time there are 19 projects for which segregations have been granted to the State and on which the lands have been opened to public entry; 8 projects for which segregations have been made to the State and on which the lands have not yet been opened to public entry; 16 projects with applications pending before the General Land Office for approval, 6 of which are withdrawn under the act of March 15, 1910; 7 projects for which the applications have been rejected in toto. Applications for three supplemental segregations for three of the projects given among those for which lands have been segregated have been rejected, and two among those for which applications are pending have been rejected. In Table 1, following, entitled "Physical statistics Carey Act projects in the State of Idaho," is given a complete list of the projects for which segregations have been made and for which applications are pending, together with physical data relating thereto. It will be noted from this table that the total area involved in all the projects is 2,171,483 acres. From Table 2 following, entitled "Status of Carey Act projects that have been formally segregated to the State of Idaho to November 1, 1912," it will be noted that the total area now segregated in the State of Idaho is 1,221,107 acres, out of which 734,881 have been entered, 453,901 have been proved up on, 216,993 have been patented to the State, and 193,892 have been patented to entrymen. From this table it will also be seen that the first segregation under the act was in 1899, and this only for 6,093 acres, and that only four segregations were made prior to the passage of the reclamation act, which gave a stimulus to this character of irrigation development in the State. The majority of the segregations are comparatively recent, having been made subsequent to 1906. Only about 16 per cent of the land segregated under the act in the State have been patented to entrymen and only about 18 per cent to the State. In Table 3, entitled "Cost statistics for all Carey Act projects in the State of Idaho," are given all the projects for which lands have been segregated and for which applications for segregations of lands have been made, with the acreages in the projects, per cents of these acreages irrigated, acreages sold, and cost data. It has been impossible to get the total area irrigated under the Carey Act projects, but the projects for which percentages are given cover nearly all the areas irrigated. These percentages, converted into acreages, give approximately 324,000 acres, which is about 15 per cent of the total areas in all the projects approved and pending and about 27 per cent of the areas of the projects approved. This represents the accomplishments under the act in the leading Carey Act State during its 19 years of existence. The estimated costs of all projects is approximately $66,790,000, of which approximately $22,846,000 have been expended. The column showing the per cents of the estimated cost expended to date, in connection with that showing the per cents of construction completed, are of interest. The costs have run high compared with the estimates in many cases, being as much as 264 per cent in one case. Attention is also called to the uniformly high costs of water rights per acre. No data are at hand as to the duty of water proposed for use by the different Carey Act projects of the State. While it is probable that many of the projects have ample water, it is definitely known that some of them have wholly inadequate supplies. The question of water supply was one not carefully looked into until recently, and the insufficiency of water has hindered, and will no doubt greatly hinder, the success of some of the projects. In general, it may be stated that Carey Act developments in Idaho have been obstructed by (a) difficulty in interesting responsible capital; (b) insufficiency of funds by construction companies; (c) poor engineering advice on costs and water supply; (d) purchase of lands at openings of projects by speculators. |