452 



STATEMENT OF AL WRIGHT 



Mr. Wright. Chairman DeFazio and Congressman LaRocco, my 

 name is Al Wright, I am the executive director of the Pacific North- 

 west UtiUties Conference Committee, which is an association of 

 public and private utilities as well as direct service industries 

 which purchase energy directly fi^om Bonneville. 



Mr. Chairman, I will take you up on your offer in the beginning, 

 and rather than read from my testimony, I would like to touch on 

 some things that have been said already. 



Quickly, I would like to just touch on a couple of points that are 

 in the testimony. One, is the Power Planning Council's strategy 

 adequate and appropriate, and what are its strengths £ind weaik- 

 nesses. Basically I tnink it is, it is a major step towards an ade- 

 quate salmon recovery program. Our criticism of it has been it is 

 long on process and short on products. 



The other major criticism we have had is it does not have an ade- 

 quate definition of accountabiUty. The good points are, it is a re- 

 gional consensus, it was developed and by and large without law- 

 suits, and I think it is being timely implemented. 



Under the issue of timely implementation, one of the problems 

 we have is we have got the wrong yardsticks. We measure it by 

 bashing Bonneville, we measure it by how much money is spent, 

 we measure it by how much energy is foregone. 



And if I can use a baseball team analogy, that is like measuring 

 the success of a baseball team by how pretty and expensive the 

 uniforms are and how high tech the equipment is. The reality is 

 you get measured by how many runs you bring in, and the reality 

 of the salmon strategy — and when we get it, the recovery plan, and 

 I hope there is a melding of those two — ^the measure of the success 

 of that program are how many fish runs we bring in. And quite 

 fi'ankly, notning else matters. 



As far as the issue of do we need to rearrange the institutional 

 arrangements, while that is intellectually attractive and entertain- 

 ing to talk about, being a refugee of the old river basin commission 

 myself, I think that is not the question in today's world. Maybe 

 something that is going to be 3 or 5 years in the making might be 

 interesting to discuss, but I think the real issue here is not chang- 

 ing an institutional arrangement that is not working well, but 

 rather does that institutional arrangement have the commitment to 

 make this a successful program and a successfiil program is in- 

 creasing run sizes, not increasing budget. 



I question that commitment is there across the board. I think 

 your analogy of a train wreck is appropriate. Ever since the demise 

 of the salmon summit, if anything the trains have been accelerat- 

 ing dramatically. Is there a place for some crossing guard to avert 

 the train wreck? I do not know, but I hope there is, and I "hope that 

 centers around words like accountability and commitment and 

 focus on the real issue and not on Bonneville bashing or Corps 

 bashing, or in my case, I can go do some NMFS basWng, which 

 while fim, is not very productive. 



But I would like to touch on a few things that were said today. 

 One is we are using the lack of science to keep the status quo. We 

 are using lack of science to avert bold action. I find that incredible 

 in Ught of a system where we have in 13 years moved fi-om about 



