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Mr. DeFazio. Could you wax poetic on the relationship between 

 BPA and the Administrator and the implementation and the plans 

 which the Council develops and how you might improve upon that, 

 or are you satisfied that it is fine, and how it might be altered in 

 a corporate relationship if BPA becomes a corporation. 



Mr. BOTTIGER. Maybe I should start out with a story that our ex- 

 ecutive director cringes whenever I start this. 



Mr. DeFazio. He is not here, is he? You are free, unless staff is 

 here to tell you you shouldn't say something. 



Mr. BOTTIGER. Sometimes we describe the Council as a paper 

 tiger with awfully sharp teeth. We just discovered a new tooth 

 about a month ago, and we wrote a little letter to FERC which was 

 just one page, and it didn't really say anything except it said the 

 section of the law that requires FERC to take our plan into consid- 

 eration in approving Bonneville's rate increase. Well, as you may 

 well remember, the sky fell. 



What are you doing getting into a rate case? It was a tooth that 

 candidly I didn't even know we had. Bonneville reacted imme- 

 diately. So the Council's program, 6-C, is another example. We 

 have absent veto authority over Bonneville acquiring Tenasca. 



You are right, the Tenasca project revealed a weakness in the re- 

 lationship on what Bonneville promised people would be commer- 

 cial, secret information submitted to Bonneville when they made a 

 decision, and Bonneville had signed an agreement and couldn't re- 

 lease those gas prices to us. 



And it is a problem, because other competitors would have that 

 information available, and we are going to have to develop a way 

 that Bonneville can relate that information so we can double-check 

 it. In that case, we took their word for it. 



We also wrote them a letter saying. Next time we are not going 

 to make that mistake. And next time when you sign those agree- 

 ments, you find a way to let the Council run a test on that gas 

 price in the future to make sure that we have got a competitive 

 program. 



But that was the first 6-C we had done since the CONMOD pro- 

 gram for the aluminum companies ten years before. So there are 

 teeth there and there is an ability, if the Council wants to exercise 

 it, and at least this current Council acts like it does. 



Mr. DeFazio. So it has had some teething problems, some new 

 teeth have popped through the gums here, and you are going to 

 chew on it thoroughly. 



Mr. BOTTIGER. There may be some others that we haven't discov- 

 ered yet. 



Mr. DeFazio. There are regular and accepted practices for public 

 utility commissions to review such proprietary documents under 

 confidentiality, and I believe that the Council could establish a like 



