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Certain major changes in public policy are needed if different
techniques of water quality improvement are to be combined in such a way
as to give the most economical, appropriate, and effective protection to
specific streams or river systems. The most important of these needed
changes concerns the role of flow augmentation as a tool, for inclusion
of water quality storage capacity in Federal reservoirs is a fairly new
and uncertain practice, and some rather deep pitfalls are becoming
evident.

One pitfall has to do with Federal Cost-sharing and the way it affects
the freedom of choice of the States and localities on which the primary
responsibility for eliminating pollution must rest. In building
treatment plants to lessen the load of wastes discharged to streams,
they can presently obtain Federal grants of up to 55% of the facilities'
total cost. But if storage capacity for water quality--i.e., for flow
augmentation--is provided in a Federal reservoir upstream, prevailing
Federal policy based in a 1961 amendment to the Federal Water Pollution
Control Act has been requiring them to pay nothing at all for it, though
before such storage is authorized they must certify that an adequate
standard of conventional treatment will be maintained downstream.
Obviously, if this continues to be so, when the inevitable choice comes
between improving on that adequate standard by investing in better
treatment, either at the beginning or later, and seeking river dilution
from a reservoir, they will be forced by sheer economics toward the
latter, whether or not it is the right thing to do or in an overall
sense the cheapest.

Like other aspects of flow augmentation already discussed, this
situation is analogous to that of flood control, where communities have
to pay a good part of the cost of local protection works or of
controlling flood plain development, but can get reservoir protection
free. In both cases, local authorities are stimulated toward choices
that are not necessarily the right ones, taxpayers in general are forced
to bear the weight of essentially local responsibilities, and the public
may forever lose scenic or recreational amenities of great worth. The
Department of the Interior, with a central interest in the problem, is
taking the lead in an attempt to arrive at a better flow-augmentation
policy that will permit right choices, put costs where they belong, and
make certain that at the local level where poll