Finding the right balance
Bruce Howard, Spokane River license manager for Avista Utilities, is the point person for the company’s dam relicensing process. On July 28, Avista filed two applications with the federal government, one for the relicensing of Avista-operated dams along the Spokane River in Washington and a second application for the relicensing of the Post Falls Dam in Idaho.
Monday, Howard, who turned 47 the day the applications were filed, talked with Rebecca Nappi, a member of The Spokesman-Review editorial board, about the relicensing process and what Howard learned about a river he already loved.
Rebecca Nappi: Describe what you’ve been doing the past three years.
Bruce Howard: We’ve been working as a team from Avista, with lots of other interested parties, trying to plan out what the next 30 to 50 years should look like for operating a Spokane River hydroelectric project.
RN: For those of us who might not know the difference between a FERC and a FRAC, can you please explain the dam relicensing process in simple language.
BH: It’s subject to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s oversight, and they are responsible for issuing licenses to any non-federal dam in the country. We’ve been operating under a license from FERC since 1972 and that license expires in two years. So the process is to evaluate how the project is operated and what kind of impacts the future operations might have and how they should be addressed in the terms of the new license. So really what we’ve been working on is figuring out what should be the terms of a new license that we would be issued by FERC.
RN: How many dams total are there on the Spokane River and how many dams does Avista operate?
BH: There are seven dams on the Spokane River, starting with Post Falls, which we operate. And then downtown there is Upper Falls and Monroe Street, which we operate. And then between the downtown and Post Falls is Upriver Dam, where Boulder Beach is, and that is operated by the city of Spokane. Downstream is Nine Mile Falls, which we operate, and Long Lake Dam, which creates Lake Spokane, and Little Falls and we operate those two as well.
RN: How much electricity do they generate?
BH: Well the five dams that are part of the Spokane River license, which are the ones we operate, except Little Falls, they on average generate about 100 megawatts. Little Falls, on average, generates about another 30 to 35 megawatts.
RN: Put that in perspective in how that meets our energy needs.
BH: A number we use a lot is that one megawatt, on average, will power 650 homes. So the Spokane River project, at 100 megawatts, that would be 65,000 homes that the Spokane River project would power.
RN: But homes in our community are not (powered) simply by the power generated by the dams. What are the other sources?
BH: Avista operates/owns a range of different power sources. There’s the hydro — the Spokane River and in addition to the Spokane River, we have Clark Fork project which is significantly larger. And then we also have natural gas turbines. We have some in Idaho on the Rathdrum Prairie and we have one called Coyote Springs in Oregon. We have a wood-waste fired generation plant in Kettle Falls and we also own a portion of the output from a coal plant in Colstrip, Mont. So it’s a blend of different sources.
RN: Why did Avista file a separate application for the Post Falls Dam?
BH: When we looked at how the issues were coming to bear around Post Falls and the rest of the project, a couple of things occurred. One is that the issues around Post Falls are somewhat distinct from the rest of the river. They really relate to Coeur d’Alene Lake and its tributaries and the unique setting and ownership there. And it also appeared to us that the timeline of ultimately resolving those issues may be different. They may not be and if they aren’t, that’s great. But if they are different, we were really looking for the opportunities to begin to implement new measures soon. So we figured by filing a separate application for Post Falls, it creates the opportunity for on-time implementation. And if it works out for both, that’s great. If for some reason, one is slower than the other, or those issues do play out differently, then that provides flexibility on being able to implement measures downstream more quickly or to figure out what the best solution really is.
RN: How did that become controversial? Why do you think it’s controversial?
BH: I think for some folks, symbolically, maybe people interpreted that we were trying to divide the issues or divide the community and that certainly wasn’t our intent. One issue that obviously relates for the whole river is what the minimum flow below Post Falls dam is. That’s an issue we really believe we’ve come close to resolving between the parties. And so, having two licenses won’t make coordination any more difficult. It doesn’t change our obligations or the kinds of decisions that are made. But I think for some folks symbolically maybe it was as if we weren’t taking a holistic view of the river. We are still taking a holistic view of the river and the water shed.
RN: Poring over the documents on Avista’s Web site, it struck me that we have never had so much information available about all facets of the river, from its history to its modern threats. How many pages did the written application, and supporting documents, turn out to be? And you can make a guesstimate.
BH: It is a total guess. I would say somewhere between 13-and 15,000 pages. I could be way off. That’s been one of the really fun things, expensive sometimes but fun. I think this relicensing process has been a way to pull together a lot of information that existed but also pull together new information and try to improve a broader understanding of the lakes and the river and the nature of the resources that depend on the river. There are other processes going on, too, but this has been a good focal point to gather together an improved understanding. I think the relicensing record reflects that.
RN: How many of those pages are available at your Web site?
BH: All — and more. One thing that has been the hallmark of this process is it’s been very transparent. We’ve posted everything that pretty much anyone has asked us to post. At the very beginning, one of the first efforts was for the contractors selected by stakeholders to go and gather all existing scientific studies. We developed a searchable data base in each of those areas and people can go to our Web site and link to that searchable data base for scientific studies that exist on the record. We’ve put every study, every meeting summary, every report, every letter people have written — it’s all posted on the Web site. People can see what’s gone on and what the dialogue has been. There’s a lot there.
RN: How many people would you say provided input?
BH: We had over 600 people signed up as stakeholders representing over 200 different entities or organizations. At some point, 600 or more people have given some level of input. At the same time, I would say there’s been a core group of really involved stakeholders, including tribal representatives, federal, state and local agency representatives and interested citizens who have devoted their time and participated. This group would be 50, 60 or maybe 75 people who put in a tremendous amount of time and effort and who brought their own interests and viewpoints but also came willing to understand and listen to others. That’s been really neat to see, too.
RN: Were there any surprising stakeholders? People or groups you didn’t know even had an interest in the river?
BH: No, but I would say that the whitewater enthusiasts came in more numbers than I would have expected. We knew they were out there and some of them are old friends. The thing that surprised me the most is the kind of knowledge and appreciation that the different groups brought with their perspective. The folks who live down at Lake Spokane have a keen appreciation for that lake and its setting. As do the folks who live on Lake Coeur d’Alene and the people who fish on the Spokane River, who fly fish, people who paddle, they all brought a different kind of knowledge and perspective and brought that together. The thing that really amazed me was the depth and the breadth of that kind of understanding and interest that people brought with them.
RN: The 12 people I intend to interview for these Spokane River Dialogues over the course of the next year will have this in common: A genuine passion and love for the river. When and how did your love affair with the river begin?
BH: Well, mine began as soon as I moved to Spokane in 1985. To be honest, I was shocked that this river just ran right through town and I was shocked at some of the property conditions along the river. And I started scheming, gosh is there any way I can, and I couldn’t, of course, buy any property. I think people who are conservationists or environmentalists, or however you want to term it, mostly have some kind of genesis experience that led to that interest.
Mine was an odd one. I grew up in Houston, Texas and it’s not really known as the nicest environment, especially to people who grew up in the Northwest. Within a couple of blocks of my house was a little creek, an unnamed creek, and when I was a little kid, there were fish, snakes, alligator snapping turtles and it ran right through our neighborhood and this was close in town. And when I was 12, the city did a storm-water project and they poured concrete around the edges of that creek and they channelized that entire creek. I watched that creek die right away. Within a year all that natural life was gone. And I took a lesson from that as a 12-year-old. I wrote a letter to the mayor. I realized it’s that easy to lose something. Later on, as I grew up, I canoed and camped a lot and I’ve always been a terrible fisherman.
When we moved to Spokane, we started paddling the river and swimming the river and I just enjoy it in every way and I think it’s an incredible treasure for all the communities up and down.
RN: Would you describe for me what you perceive, after your three years of work, what you perceive to be the biggest threat now facing the Spokane River?
BH: Indecision. There’s certainly always a number of threats to water quality. And as the population here continues to grow, it’s going to pressure both in terms of how much water we take out of the aquifer which won’t get to the river or how we use the river, how we manage our wastewater discharge and storm water discharge and just the impact of growing population. But I say indecision because at the same time, the quality of the river has improved enormously over the last 30 years and while there are still significant issues — and some of them will be long-term to deal with like the legacy of the lead waste in the Coeur d’Alene basin — there are many ongoing improvements we can make. We mainly need to move ahead with decisions and implement practical, continued efforts to protect the river and the quality of the river. And the same thing is true for the relicensing project — making timely decisions, moving ahead and starting to do the kinds of things we know are good for the environment as well as the community.
RN: I will be interviewing representatives of the Indian tribes for this series, but as you know, officials from regional tribes, especially the Coeur d’Alenes, had serious concerns about the relicensing. How would you characterize one or two of their concerns and how will Avista address these concerns?
BH: I want to be careful not to necessarily characterize someone else’s positions. But the Coeur d’Alene tribe has been very clear in expressing their concerns about the quality of the environment around Coeur d’Alene Lake. And how they would perceive the impacts of the presence of Post Falls dam, whether that is wetlands in the southern portion of the lake on the reservation, fishery habitat, water quality — a broad range of issues. Those concerns have been eloquently expressed over the past three years and more.
The way we’ve tried to address those is to gain a better understanding of their perspective by the time we spent together in technical work groups and looking at information together. And I also believe the proposals we’ve made in our new license applications are responsive to the concerns they’ve expressed. What they do is move in the direction of trying to support the preferred environmental improvements the tribe has expressed they’d like to see. And that’s something we can support and want to support.
In the case of the Spokane tribe, one of the key concerns they’ve expressed is the quality of the water below Long Lake dam and the good thing is the temperature of that water is very good because of just how we’re lucky where the intakes of the turbines are there. We are going to look at ways to improve the dissolved oxygen levels in that discharge, which will improve the quality of the water for fish and all the resources of the tribes downstream. Both tribes have been very active and engaged in broader cultural resource issues in the entire setting. We’ve learned a lot and we’ve been working very closely with the tribes on how to address as well.
RN: One of the possibilities mentioned for the future of the Post Falls dam is that if it becomes too expensive to operate, it might be decommissioned or sold. And that’s a big “might be.” Who buys dams these days?
BH: I guess they do change hands from time to time. That’s not really our focus. Our belief is that Post Falls can be relicensed in a reasonable way and we can continue to operate it. That’s what we’re really going to focus on. Trying to find the right mix of solutions that will allow that to happen and really balance out, to strike the right balance, of the upstream benefits and the downstream benefits because our customers are both upstream and downstream and they are all going to be involved in paying for changes and new costs associated with that. And we just hope to strike the right kind of balance.
RN: What would happen if all the dams were removed? What would the river be like?
BH: It’s hard to predict what it would be like. The flow pattern would certainly change. There’d be more water flowing in July and August and less in September and October. The flows would probably get lower than they do at the very lowest. Coeur d’Alene Lake would go down quite a bit in the summer, as much as 7 and a half feet. There’d be no Lake Spokane. There’d be a very narrow river channel so none of the people at Lake Spokane or Coeur d’Alene Lake would have the same kind of situation.
And I think that, even if you look at it from wastewater loading, the same wastewater would be in the river and transported downstream to the next lake or reservoir and would much really improve? It’s hard to know. And on balance, I think it would be a huge loss, both in terms of the kind of environment the people have come to enjoy for about 100 years, as well as from an energy and economic perspective in both the Washington and Idaho communities that surround the lake and river.
RN: Avista is proposing some “voluntary” environmental measures to the river under the FERC application. Which are you most excited about?
BH: Gosh, I don’t know how to answer that. We’re just ready to get started. I’m just excited about not going to meetings and starting to talk about doing things on the rivers and the lake. I don’t have any personal favorites because they could all be great. The thing I’m most excited about is working with resource managers in Washington and Idaho, states and tribes and others and interested citizens in doing the real planning of OK, what kind of fishery measures make the most sense to support cutthroat trout and bull trout in Coeur d’Alene Lake or what measures will make the most sense to continue to support the rainbow trout in Spokane River. I’m excited about it all.
RN: The one I was most excited about — and it might be an aesthetic proposal — is to keep the river flowing through Riverfront Park all summer long. To me, it always looks so forlorn in July and smelly. Talk a little bit more about how that would work.
BH: The proposal we’ve made for an aesthetic spill in downtown would be that during daylight hours, similar to the kind of pattern that we spill water here at Monroe Street, we would open up the gates at the north channel and keep water running down that north channel all during the summer. We’d also look for ways to restore the natural channel characteristics a little bit to spread the water out so it provides the aesthetic elements people say they like. People like to see the whitewater over the rocks and the sound is wonderful. We’d look for the way to make the most out of that spilled water. And there would be water we wouldn’t run through the turbines. Clearly, a lot of folks said they would like to see that happen in downtown and it would be a neat feature in Riverfront Park.
RN: I was also surprised that the application made for some pretty interesting reading. I didn’t know, for instance, that at Long Lake dam you have an emergency system set up there because if it was breached, the downstream houses would be inundated with up to 15 feet of water. Talk about the emergency warning system.
BH: One of the things that FERC requires is that we have emergency action plans for any dam where there could a hazard to a downstream structure. Now the houses we are referring to are Avista employee housing, just so you know. The kind of emergency planning we do ranges from if there was a boater situation and there was a problem or if a power house tripped off and we had to open spill gates or even in the absolute worst case, if Long Lake Dam were breached or there was a break or something. We do practice drills and we file plans and it’s the kind of thing the federal government takes very seriously. We also do regular engineering evaluations of all of our dams for safety, for structural integrity and we file reports on that, so there’s an ongoing program of dam safety, both inherent to the structure of the dam and also how we operate and how we would respond to any emergencies.
RN: Do you really blow a siren?
BH: There are sirens, yeah.
RN: When do they blow?
BH: The main time would be during a test, a trial run type of situation.
RN: What is the next stop in the process?
BH: FERC has the application. It’s in their hands now in a lot of ways. They will begin their review and they’ll publish a schedule that will lay out the next 18 months to two years, some of the key milestones they’ll follow. They’ll take our information and they’ll do their own, independent environmental analysis about the proposal and about the condition of the resources and the impacts of the dam. They’ll also seek ongoing input from tribes, resource agencies and the general public about additional information needs people feel are warranted or just their opinions about the impacts. They also will seek terms and conditions from agencies in both the state and federal levels and some of those are in the form of recommendations and some of those are in the form of mandatory conditions those agencies can place. They’ll put all that together and eventually they will issue an order, a license decision.
In the meantime, we are going to continue to work with stakeholders. We really did get substantial areas of agreement before we filed and we’re ready to pick that work back up with key stakeholders and see if we can close the gaps. Our goal would be to file settlement agreement with FERC while they’re doing their analysis so they can hear from this group of stakeholders “We’ve reached agreement on these issues and we think you FERC should also agree with us.” So we are going to work in that way as well.
RN: So if all goes well, when will they be relicensed?
BH: The current license expires Aug. 1, 2007. So ideally, they would be relicensed prior to that so a new license could take effect at that time.
RN: And how long will the new license be in effect?
BH: The new license term would be up to FERC. It would be in the 30-to-50-year range.
RN: You’ve been working on this nonstop for three years? Are you sick of the river yet?
BH: No. I’ll never be sick of this river. In fact, my son and I paddled yesterday from below Upriver Dam to downtown. I could never get sick of the river. I’d like to spend more time on the river, less time in meetings. I’m a little tired of meetings but they are a necessary evil to working together with folks. Certainly, the paperwork gets a little tiresome. But if it all supports a substantial, practical, real outcome, then it’s all going to be worth it.
RN: Someone said to me, “Well you know he was an environmentalist before he went to work for Avista.” What was your job before Avista?
BH: I’ve had a range of different roles. I worked in the Spokane office of the Department of Ecology for over 10 years. Most recently I managed the water resources program. Prior to being ecology, and after ecology, I worked for two computer companies. I worked for what was ISC. It’s now Getronics. I worked for a company called Northern Technologies that does surge suppression. I’ve always had this schizophrenic in a way career between different areas. My training is really in environmental sciences and natural resources but actually I find the work at Avista is just right in the sense that what I really like being involved in is trying to make practical decisions on how we can live on Earth right now and how is the best way to be a steward of the resources that are here. I really believe that is our goal with the Spokane River relicensing. That’s what really is compelling to me. We have an obligation to make decisions and do the best we can, where we are, when we’re here, with the resources we’ve been given. It’s my goal personally and our goal as a company to be a good steward.
My first year in college I worked as a naturalist for the National Park Service at Assateague Island National Seashore. It’s a beautiful barrier island. Everyday, I gave beach walks and marsh walks. I loved that environment. But we lived in little trailers on the mainland. I’d come out of the trailer in the morning and there were soybean fields. I started to wonder about that juxtaposition. Why do we love one but we ignore this other part of the environment and the world? At that point, I actually shifted my educational route, and in many ways my professional route, to try to find a way to appreciate both at the same time and to figure out how is the right way to live on Earth. And what do we do? We have to eat. We provide warmth and light and that’s an important part of life. How do we do that in a responsible way?
Questions from Colin Mulvany, videographer for www.spokesmanreview.com
CM: What is your favorite part of the river?
BH: I love canoeing the upper reach below Post Falls down to near the Valley because it’s warm, it’s fun to swim. When I canoe I always get wet. What I found downstream from the Valley mall, when the aquifer comes in, it’s not fun to tump because the water is so cold. I love every part. It has different characteristics. What I’ve really come to appreciate is Coeur d’Alene Lake or Lake Spokane. The tributaries to the Coeur d’Alene Lake – it really is amazing — the St. Joe and some of the creeks. They are all different.
CM: What’s your favorite view of the river?
BH: From my office. And that’s my reminder when I’m stuck in paperwork or working on my computer I am able to look up and look out. Just to see the river is a good reminder. I really do like being downtown, too, any part of downtown.
CM: How do you utilize the river for recreation?
BH: Canoeing is what I do the most, and swimming. Occasionally, a little ill-mannered fly fishing, catch and release. I need a refresher course. I run and bike on the Centennial Trail. In the summer, we’ll run for awhile, then toss the shoes and jump in the river.
CM: What do you tell your kids about the river? What wisdom do you give them?
BH: I don’t think I give any wisdom to them at all. I like to point out things to observe. One way to appreciate a place is to observe and learn from it. I like to take the kids whether we’re hiking along the river and there’s some cool trails near the parks at Post Falls. Or whether we’re paddling, just to point out, to see rainbow trout, to see the service berries and eat them. To identify plants, to see Osprey. It’s good to see with knowledge and try to understand. That’s what leads to real appreciation.