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STATEMENT OF ED CHANEY 



Mr. Chaney. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today be- 

 fore the task force. My name is Ed Cnaney, I am Executive Direc- 

 tor of the Northwest Resource Information Center, and I regret to 

 say I have spent going on 30 years dealing with the issue that is 

 before the task force. 



I tried to get here late so I would not have to Usten again to the 

 happy face put on this disaster by the agencies, but unfortimately 

 I got in on it. I would like to talk about the dark side of that happy 

 face a little bit. 



Listening to the agencies, you would not know that Congress in- 

 structed the Corps to build these projects in a way that protected 

 fish and dependent Northwest economies back in the 1940s. You 

 would not know it has been 13 years since when that failed, that 

 Congress declared an emergency. That is the Congress' term. 



You would know that the Corps now says, well, it may take us 

 another 15 or 20 years, who knows, depending on what more stud- 

 ies will yet reveal. Meanwhile, thousands and thousands of people's 

 Uves have been destroyed; communities, economies have been dev- 

 astated; billions of dollars have been lost to the region and the Na- 

 tion, And Bonneville and the Corps have done unto the Northwest 

 tribes what Buffalo Bill and the boys did to the Great Plains tribes 

 when they wiped out the buffalo. 



It all sounds so good when you hear these agencies talking about 

 it, but the problem is there are real people out there who are being 

 hurt and what we get is more promises that one of these d^s, 

 folks, just hang in there, if we have a little more process, a few 

 more committees, and some more studies, we will be able to prove 

 that Darwin was onto something, that salmon need rivers instead 

 of lakes in order to survive. 



Thirteen years after the passage of the Northwest Power Act, 

 fi-ankly, things are worse than they were when the Act was passed. 

 As an insider who has lived with this for those 13 years, I have 

 got some fairly strong opinions about why we inherited the mess 

 that we have. 



One very important thing — and I am going to focus most of my 

 comments on Bonneville — Bonneville and PNUCC which represents 

 the utiUties and others, for the first decade of the Power Act, basi- 

 cally cowed the Northwest Power Council and kept it from dealing 

 with the pivotal issue of downstream migrant mortality that really 

 provided the initial impetus for the fish and wildlife provisions of 

 the Power Act. 



Finally, imder enormous pressure and faced with a decade of fail- 

 ure, the Council did adopt the only measure that will rationally 

 deal with that, and that is to return the operations of these 

 mainstem reservoirs to some semblance of a river, which I think 

 Darwin would appreciate, so that we can reduce migrant survival 

 to a tolerable level. Bonneville and PNUCC of course have re- 

 sponded with doomsday predictions that the lights are going to go 

 out and the Uttle old ladies in the 1-5 corridor are going to be at 

 the risk of fi*eezing to death during the next Arctic chill event and 

 it goes on and on, all of which of coiirse is nonsense. 



Bonneville has basically set out a deUberate strategy to kind of 

 co-opt the program. Once they saw they were going to have to have 



