Littauer School Professors Plan Conservation Projects

For the next three years, the Littauer School of Public Administration will develop a comprehensive program--utilizing economic, technical, and legal factors--to get the most from the nation's water resources.

Combining basic and applied research with advanced training for administrative officials, the program will start next September. Under this plan, the school will annually train ten officials from government conservation agencies in the administration of water control projects. Their instruction will center around a series of seminars with a research team of economists, engineers, and political scientists.

Utilizing recently improved techniques, the team will develop comprehensive experimental projects for improvement of the Delaware and Texas Washita river basins. Economic analysis of the areas with legal streamlinging of the administration will implement the purely technical improvements.

Financed by a $150,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation the program is the first combined study of the application of new scientific and administrative techniques to the design of water resources projects.

The seminars will be led by Arthur A. Maass, associate professor of Government, who described the program as an attempt to "fill the need for fundamental research bringing together the knowledge and research of both the social and applied scientist." He emphasized that recent population increases and technological improvements have greatly complicated the study of conservation techniques. "Federal laws on the field are confusing and inconsistent, making comprehensive, integrated programs difficult to develop," he said.

Maass noted that "we have built bigger and better dams, canals, and aqueducts--longer and stronger electric lines."

Other members of the seminar are Gordon M. Fair, Gordon McKay Professor of Sanitary Engineering, Harold A. Thomas, Jr., associate professor of Sanitary Engineering, Robert Dorfman, associate professor of Economics, and Otto Eckstein, instructor in Economics. The program as a whole is coordinated by Maynard M. Hufschmidt, a 1955 Conservation Fellow.