City Says Threat To River By Higher Dam Overrated Study Disputes Federal Cost Estimates Of Damage From Raising Upriver Dam

Federal researchers greatly overestimated the environmental threat of raising a Spokane River dam, consultants for the city of Spokane contend in a recent study.

The $12,500 study, paid for by Spokane city water customers, disputes many of the figures and assumptions included in an environmental impact statement prepared by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Engineers want to raise by 18 inches the height of the city’s Upriver Dam, located near Felts Field airport. The project can’t be done without federal approval.

The city already has spent more than $400,000 preparing to raise the dam, and predicts the project would cost another $500,000, plus $10,000 a year to maintain.

With taller gates, more water would be forced through the dam’s turbines, generating an additional $173,000 worth of electricity a year. That money would help keep water costs down, since the city uses its own electricity to pump water from wells, and sells excess power.

Four miles of free-flowing river were turned into a pool when Upriver Dam was built in 1910. Another four-tenths of a mile would be stilled if the dam is raised.

Included on that stretch are whitewater and riffles used by fish, fishermen, and some canoeists and kayakers. The affected water begins at the Centennial Trail bridge near Plantes Ferry Park.

There is no way the city could make up for the “significant” harm to recreational uses and the beauty of the river, according to the environmental impact statement released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission earlier this year.

The report estimated 1,500 boaters and 800 fishermen use the threatened whitewater each year, and that businesses would lose about $140,000 annually if it is flooded.

There’s little documentation the numbers are correct, wrote consultants from Northrop, Devine & Tarbell, Inc., an engineering and environmental science firm based in Vancouver, Wash.

Even if the numbers are right, the firm wrote, river users can find plenty of rapids in the 18 miles of free-flowing water between the dam pool and Post Falls Dam in Idaho.

“They might choose another location, but the recreation activity and visitor days would still occur,” according to the study.

Besides, the consultants wrote, “Upriver Dam provides important recreational opportunities not available elsewhere on the river,” like water skiing. Those uses would expand with the pool.

The consultants also take exception with the federal estimate of the amount of money river-runners spend to play in the whitewater, which equates to $67 per boater per day. That’s about what people pay to run wilderness rivers with much more dramatic waves, they wrote.

As for harm to the view from the Centennial Trail bridge, “It is unclear how (researchers) determined that only a ‘free-flowing river’ enhances the trail and, by implication, that other portions of the river are not worth seeing.”

The consultants also question how many of the trail’s 40,000 users ever get to the bridge or see the rapids. The bridge is within sight of a popular trailhead and parking lot.

The city first asked permission to raise the dam in 1986, when there was little opposition.

Problems at the dam - including a washout in 1986 - delayed the project until 1993. By then, large sections of the Centennial Trail were completed, and canoeing and fly fishing were gaining popularity.

City engineers were caught off-guard by opposition from a wide array of groups, including the state Department of Ecology, whose staff wrote in 1985 that they could see no problem with the plan.

The city’s consultants wrote that the Ecology Department should stick with its 1985 assessment, since “neither the project nor its anticipated impacts have changed.”

, DataTimes