374 



Eugene and Seattle, have paid an additional $250 million and cur- 

 rently we are in the process of making decisions that will spend 

 hxindreds of millions of dollars more. 



In Grant County, we have lost about 10 percent of our generating 

 capabiUties to salmon. Replacement power costs four times as 

 much as our own sources. This loss has resulted because ten mil- 

 Uon acre-feet of water, which is twice the volume of Lake Roo- 

 sevelt, was transferred from power product to fish. We will be turn- 

 ing to conservation and natural gas to make up that shortfall and 

 to maintain an inexpensive power supply. 



Now let me put this one biUion dollars in perspective. This is not 

 paid by me or Ed or the rest of us in this room, it is paid by real 

 people, and these people are not nonsense, as has been alluded to 

 earlier. 



Let me give you some examples. For 10 years of my Kfe, I spent 

 working for the State of Oregon and during that time I spent 

 countless hours in public hearings and never once in any of those 

 hearings did I see anyone who could not pay their electric bills. 

 Seven years ago, I started work at Canby, Oregon's mimicipal elec- 

 tric system and I was ten steps from the front counter where peo- 

 ple who could not pay their bills came. When they could not pay 

 their bills, they ended up in front of me. I can remember the first 

 time a lady came in who was left alone and only had social security 

 to pay her bill, and I remember a carpenter with five kids came 

 in because he was waiting for his worker's comp. None of those 

 people ever showed up at any of these hearings. 



At Canby and at Grant, I have seen our own employees, some 

 of which are single moms earning less than $10 an hour, reach into 

 their own pocket to pay utility bills. I have seen them mow lawns 

 for customers because the customer was having to choose between 

 whether to pay a kid to mow the lawn or to pay their electric bill. 



I have seen electric consumption for apartments that could have 

 only meant that the people living there were having to choose be- 

 tween food, hot water or heat. 



I have talked at rate hearings to gentle farmers who ask how are 

 they going to absorb rate increases when wheat is selling for the 

 same as it did 10, 20 or 30 years ago. This is what the bilhon dol- 

 lars me£ins to carpenters, widows and the elderly and farmers. 



In Grant County, the salmon measures, the change in flows, 

 would have required us to raise rates 9 percent every year. Our 

 customers said they could not handle that, so what we did is elimi- 

 nated one out of six jobs in our utihty. And that is what this billion 

 dollars and these flows has meant to utihty workers. 



So we have changed. There is 10 bilhon acre-feet of water that 

 is moved from power production to fish and these people have paid 

 that price. Now if we had gotten something productive from that, 

 we could go back to them and tell them with some pride what we 

 had accomphshed. But the tragedy is, I agree with Ed Chaney 

 here, that over the last 10 years, the fish are worse off than they 

 were when they began this effort. The billion dollars apparently 

 has been wasted. 



Now we beheve — at least I believe — ^that this is the recurring 

 theme of the Tragedy of the Commons. No one is responsible for 



