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Council report documents BPA fish and wildlife spending

September 11, 2002

In a report released today for public review and comment, the Council documents expenditures of $6 billion by the federal Bonneville Power Administration between 1978 and 2001 to protect and enhance fish and wildlife affected by hydropower dams in the Columbia River Basin.

"While our report responds to a request from the Governors of the four Northwest states, it also should be useful to electricity ratepayers who want to understand how their money is being spent on fish and wildlife in the Columbia River Basin," said Council Member Tom Karier of Spokane, chairman of the Council's Power Committee, who oversaw production of the report.

The report is based on information provided by Bonneville, the federal agency that markets and transmits the output of 31 hydroelectric dams and one non-federal nuclear power plant in the Columbia River Basin. According to the report, Bonneville assigns more than half of its total fish and wildlife expenditures – $3.44 billion – to the value of power purchases and forgone revenues. These are increased costs of power or reduced power-sale revenues, respectively, that result from changes in hydropower generation due to river operations required to protect fish.

Also according to the draft report, Bonneville spent $1.02 billion to implement the Council's Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program, which includes on-the-ground efforts such as habitat improvements, habitat purchases, research, fish production, and so on. The remainder of the fish and wildlife spending was on fixed expenses, such as debt service on federal bonds to pay for fish passage projects ($957.7 million), and to repay a portion of the fish and wildlife expenses of other federal agencies ($582.9 million), primarily the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The Council's draft report is the second issued this year dealing with government spending in the Columbia River Basin. In July, the U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report on the expenditures of 11 federal agencies on Columbia River salmon and steelhead. The Council report and the GAO report were developed separately and differ in several important aspects:

• The Council's report focuses only on expenditures of the Bonneville Power Administration, for two primary reasons: that was the charge to the Council from the Governors, and Bonneville implements the Council's fish and wildlife program.
• The Council's report documents Bonneville's spending on all fish and wildlife affected by hydropower in the Columbia basin, which is Bonneville's legal requirement, not only on salmon and steelhead.
• The GAO report counts Bonneville's payments to other federal agencies as salmon expenditures of those agencies; the Council's report treats those payments as Bonneville expenditures.
• The GAO did not include Bonneville's power purchases and forgone revenues because, according to the GAO, they do not reflect expenditures for actual recovery actions and are difficult to determine. The Council's report includes them because Bonneville attributes them to its fish and wildlife budget and is recovering them in its electricity rates.

The Council's report notes that in the drought year of 2001, Bonneville attributed $1.5 billion to power purchases and forgone revenues that resulted from river operations required by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. All but $115.9 million was for power purchases. The extremely high power purchase costs reflect wholesale power prices during late 2000 and early 2001, which increased more than tenfold as the result of the drought and the energy crisis in California. Bonneville has to buy power on the wholesale market because it is unable to generate enough electricity to meet all of its customers' demand. According to an analysis by the Council, if 2001 had been a more normal water year, the value of the same amount of power purchases and forgone revenues would have been $122.3 million.

The Council's draft report documents Bonneville's fish and wildlife spending in several ways, such as by species, geographic region and general purposes. The report also includes specific information on expenditures related to wildlife, as opposed to fish, and on adult salmon and steelhead returns.

The Council is an agency of the states of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington and is directed by the Northwest Power Act of 1980 to prepare a program to protect, mitigate and enhance fish and wildlife of the Columbia River Basin affected by hydropower dams while also assuring the region an adequate, efficient, economical and reliable power supply.

Contact:  John Harrison, Information Officer, 503-222-5161,

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