149 



I want to report to your task force that I am pleased with what 

 is on the horizon. Next week, some of us are meeting with the Ad- 

 ministrator and some of the utihties. That is a first, as far as I 

 know, certainly in my short tenure, and I welcome it. This is what 

 should have happened long ago, and that is why, if you can keep 

 your ball in the court, I would sure appreciate it. 



Mr. DeFazio. So it is sort of a sea change or perhaps in this case 

 we should taJk about in-stream flows, but something along those 

 lines. Okay. 



Another question directed to the council members, again talking 

 about being results oriented. It seems to me you could have a more 

 measurable results-oriented program. I mean it is frustrating to 

 measure the results, particularly when we deal with life cycles and 

 we do not know whether what exactly something we do today, 

 means in terms of the returns particularly even when you add on 

 the parameters like last year's drought. El Nino, whatever. That is 

 something we are going to have to continue to deal with, but that 

 does not mean we should get into paralysis. 



And it seems to me that your plan calls for combinations of flows 

 and drawdowns and in your minds, or actually in the plan, you 

 have an objective; if they are fully implemented you are going to 

 get flows of a certain magnitude and velocities of a certain mag- 

 nitude. I am wondering, rather than the targets — you know, let us 

 have these flows, let us have these drawdowns — why didn't you es- 

 tablish an aggregate target and say, okay, this is the velocity, this 

 is the flows we want to achieve, something a httle harder. That is 

 measurable. 



If everything you had suggested was done, we would get to that 

 poini, but you (hd not say, okay, we think we have to get to this 

 point, here is the point, it is measurable, now you go out and do 

 whatever combination of flows and drawdown is necessary to reach 

 that. 



Mr. Grace. And I think what you are referring to is to do what 

 NMFS ultimately did: say we need so much water at this point at 

 a given time in the river. And frankly, at the time we made our 

 recommendations, and I am still not certain that we have enough 

 knowledge to know whether that can be done and is do-able in dif- 

 ferent years, to leave water remaining in the reservoirs for succeed- 

 ing years. It is much more complicated than just saying we need 

 so much water at this point in time at a certain place in the river. 



But we considered that and collectively chose not to go that way 

 in our Strategy for Salmon, We preferred to make a certain amount 

 of water available and let the agencies that had the knowledge, use 

 that to the best of their ability. In other words, this is your bank 

 account, you can withdraw it imtil it is empty and start another 

 year, because otherwise, I guess parochially from my standpoint, 

 from Montana, I am real concerned about how all of these actions 

 are going to affect the resident fish and wildlife in the State of 

 Montana in our reservoirs. But if you change one reservoir's action, 

 you are going to change others. There is no 



Mr. DeFazio. I xmderstand, but this goes back to the earlier 

 salad bar question — I think it was Mr. LaRocco's question — about, 

 you know, this would be a way to say there is going to be a plate 

 of food on the table at the end. I am not saying you should build 



