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you do. So they know very well what the consequences of — I will 

 not say poor, but decisions that do not work out as well. There are 

 a number of managers, certainly a large number of commissioners 

 and directors, who are no longer directly involved in public power 

 as a consequence of what happened with the supply system in the 

 late 1970s and the early 1980s. So those consequences are very di- 

 rect and they are very clear, and the signals are very direct. 



Mr. DeFazio. If I could just say, I heard testimony in Portland 

 on their perception that the BPA is becoming uncompetitive, non- 

 competitive. The question is, when the road curves over the hori- 

 zon, what is really there. If you look at the levelized cost of some 

 of the acquisitions that some of the public utilities have gotten into, 

 you know, except under a worst-case scenario, they would not seem 

 to be paying off, although maybe they are getting something else 

 out of this. 



Mr. Drummond. But look at the Mid-Columbia utilities; you 

 heard from Grant yesterday. Grant Public Utility District in 

 central Washington developed a resource at a time when the cost 

 of power from that generating project was twice what Bonneville's 

 rate is today. And now their rates are considerably lower than vir- 

 tually any other Bonneville customer. So there are risks to be sure, 

 but if I as a utility manager or as a public utility run a bidding 

 process and I come in with developers and I look at the various 

 risks, there is no way that you can argue that remaining a full-re- 

 quirements customer is a risk-free strategy, 



Mr. DeFazio. No, I am not trying to say that, but we have an 

 imperfect mechanism, you know. From my perspective, the private 

 utilities are probably more accountable than the public utilities, in 

 a way. [Laughter.] 



No, in a way, they are. 



Mr. Drummond. I disagree with that statement completely. They 

 face the voters each and every time they stand election and that 

 is accountability, as you well know. 



Mr. DeFazio. If I can just finish my statement, Mr. Drummond. 

 The private utilities have to go before a PUC, which is equipped 

 with extraordinary resources to comb through their proposals and 

 to impose mandates on them. It is an imperfect mechanism to say 

 that the public is constantly monitoring the actions of the public 

 utilities within a margin. If you get to an extraordinary' point like 

 when I led the candlelight ratepayers march to the Springfield 

 Utility Board a decade or so ago you get past a certain point and 

 you can organize the public. For the most part, a 15 percent rate 

 increase or a decision to purchase a small percentage of the 

 WPPSS projects is done with no public scrutiny. There was one 

 person who came before the Springfield Utility Board, that perfect 

 publicly elected body, to protest the purchase of the WPPSS. He 

 turned out to be really right, but most everyone else did not care. 

 Power was cheap. 



So I am just saying I think we need another level of certainty, 

 which comes from the Public Power Council or somewhere else, 

 that we are making these best decisions because an awful lot of 

 those decisions are made at Board meetings when there is no one 

 there, and people are not going to come. And ten years later, when 

 they find out, God, they have really stuck us with something here. 



