Officials clash over adding salmon plans to Columbia River Treaty

The potential inclusion of salmon management provisions in the U.S.-Canadian treaty that governs the largest river in the Pacific Northwest dominated debate yesterday at a House Natural Resources Committee field hearing on the agreement.

The two key tenets of the original Columbia River Treaty focus on dam operation to create hydropower and flood control management. The treaty, implemented in 1964, does not have an end date, but many of its provisions can expire in 2024 with 10 years' notice.

Negotiations can officially begin in September 2014, a decade before the provisions could end, and federal officials emphasized the need to modernize the treaty -- including formalizing the plans for salmon in the region, which are considered endangered.

For more than 20 years, the United States and Canada have been able to work within the treaty to allow for the release of about 1 million acre-feet of water annually to help with river flows, a move meant to improve salmon runs.

Elliot Mainzer, acting administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration, said it was important for that to become an official part of the treaty.

"We want to continue to have these functions without having to negotiate it on an ad hoc basis," he told committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and ranking member Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) in Pasco, Wash.

His comments were backed up by Brig. Gen. John Kem, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers' Northwestern Division. The official inclusion of the function would mean there would be no annual negotiations between Canada and the United States on the water releases, which would help cut costs.

Their testimony jibed with a draft regional recommendation on the treaty released earlier this year.

But Hastings, who expressed doubts about the draft, continued to be a vocal opponent of the proposal.

"Negotiations with the Canadians over the entitlement and flood control will be challenging enough as is without injecting vaguely worded and contentious items, many of which can, or already are, being addressed appropriately through domestic processes," he said.

Adding to the treaty would only make it more complicated, he said, which should be avoided. He also expressed concern that an agreement on salmon management on the river would eventually become outdated, a worry that some of the witnesses supported.

Still, Kathryn Brigham, secretary-treasurer of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, pointed out that without a formal agreement, any sort of procedure could change at the whim of whoever was in charge.

"I know it's complicated," she said. "But it's something we're willing to work together on."

Others at the hearing said the focus of treaty discussions hinged on Canada's share of the downstream power benefits on the river, known as the Canadian Entitlement. The Bonneville Power Administration estimates that it is worth between $250 million and $300 million annually.

The share is based on estimates made in 1964. Scott Corwin, executive director of the Public Power Council, said those numbers no longer make sense. According to his estimates, ratepayers in the Pacific Northwest are likely to pay about $2 billion in benefits to Canada over the next 10 years of the treaty.

"This inequity is unsustainable," he said. "The focus should be on analyzing the problems in the current methodology for calculating the Canadian Entitlement, identifying possible solutions for correcting these problems and implementing a recommendation for addressing these matters with Canada at the earliest possible time."

DeFazio said he expects the entitlement to be a heated point of contention between negotiators.

For its part, Canada's interest was represented by Kathy Eichenberger, executive director of the treaty review team at the British Columbia Ministry of Energy and Mines. The country estimates its entitlement to be worth between $98 million and $138 million depending on market prices, much lower than BPA's assessment.

British Columbia, which receives the entitlement, intends to review the costs of the entitlement to determine its true value.

"We want to follow the original principle of the treaty, which is to share power fairly," she said.