Al Wright chaired the meeting of the Transmission Work Group at the Northwest Power Planning Council’s offices in Portland. About 25 people attended the meeting.

The meeting began with a discussion of what we could discuss. In the absence of progress on a mechanism to deal with the potential problem of cost recovery for Bonneville’s power marketing ("transition costs"), some in the group advocated returning to discussion of FERC regulation of BPA. They thought that there were issues that could be addressed without knowing the final form of the transition cost mechanism, and the group should go ahead and discuss them. The representatives of the publicly-owned utilities disagreed with this approach, saying that they really couldn’t pursue these other issues until the transition cost issue was settled. In the end, the group agreed to put off discussion of FERC regulation of BPA until later.

Staff distributed a draft of a comparison of several proposals for legislation affecting the Northwest utility industry, in particular BPA, asking for comments and suggestions on the points of comparison, additional proposals and the accuracy of the staff’s characterization of the proposals covered. Staff will incorporate these comments and suggestions in a revised comparison.

The group agreed to meet on December 19, 1997, hopefully to build on progress at the Transition Board meeting dealing with transition costs on December 18. The staff will be pulling together a matrix comparing transition cost proposals to be distributed before the meeting on the 19^th.