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tomer is king, that is of course a marketing ploy for the customers, 

 and we all take it with a grain of salt. Businesses are not ulti- 

 mately accountable to their customers; they are ultimately account- 

 able to their shareholders. And the shareholders of the Bonneville 

 system are the customers' customers, the retail customers, the citi- 

 zens of the Northwest, and arguably the taxpayers of the country 

 who have made an investment in the Northwest hydrosystem. I do 

 not hear any mention of the shareholders' interests in all these 

 business analogies and I would assert that it is time for a share- 

 holders' meeting. 



We put the goals of the Act there for very good reasons, and I 

 firmly believe that those reasons are not inconsistent with the com- 

 petitiveness. Those goals preserve the region's comparative advan- 

 tage by having us use our hydropower resources as efficiently as 

 possible. They preserve our incomparable natural resources which 

 is a good part of what is attractive about this region over other re- 

 gions. They attempt to restore our economically and culturally val- 

 uable fisheries. And frankly they reduce the potential for paralyz- 

 ing conflict among all the parties seated here at the table today 

 about what our energy future looks like. I think in sum they en- 

 hance the competitiveness in the Northwest economy by making it 

 a better place to live £ind work and by giving us a more rational 

 energy system. That is the kind of competitiveness that I think 

 Congress envisioned when it wrote the Act, and it is the kind of 

 competitiveness that we can still endorse and the region can still 

 live with. 



I would urge you to reaffirm that definition of competitiveness at 

 a time when it is frankly under siege. I think it is especially critical 

 to do that because that definition, instead of pitting the sharehold- 

 ers against the customers, brings the shareholders and the cus- 

 tomers together, and we have had a lot of success working together 

 over the last ten years. But frankly the move to adopt a definition 

 of competitiveness that strongly favors the customers over the 

 shareholders will pit us against each other in the way that we were 

 in 1980, and I do not think that was particularly constructive from 

 many of our perspectives. 



I want to thank you for holding this hearing and particularly for 

 bringing these somewhat arcane technical issues into a political 

 spotlight and shedding a sense of political consequence on these de- 

 cisions, which deserve every bit of that sense of political con- 

 sequence. Thank you very much. 



[Prepared statement of Mr. Golden follows:] 



