Tribe seeking data on effects of dam

Showing up for a meeting with three attorneys in power suits is one way to stand out from the crowd, and it’s an approach that worked Tuesday for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s Robert Matt during a meeting of stakeholders involved in the convoluted relicensing of the Post Falls Dam.

Matt, director of the tribe’s lake management program, told the stakeholders group that the tribe has been asking for two years for information about how the lake and the Spokane River would appear if the Post Falls Dam didn’t exist. The three-lawyer backup was a signal that the tribe is serious about seeing the data and doesn’t want Avista to submit its fast-approaching license application without addressing a free-flowing river.

The tribe is not advocating that Avista remove the dam, Avista officials and tribal attorneys said Wednesday. In fact, the tribe may seek federally authorized payments for lands that are flooded when Avista stores water for power generation and maintains a high water level in the lake during summers.

“What we are trying to find out is: What are the impacts and effects of storing the water? They are storing 8 feet of water or 7 feet of water in the lake for power generation,” Howard Funke, a Coeur d’Alene attorney who has worked closely with the tribe on lake issues, said Wednesday. “In order to get a legitimate view of that, we need some assessment of what the system was like pre-project, and what are the effects of water storage since the project has been in place.”

Funke, one of the three attorneys backing Matt on Tuesday, said Avista had been ignoring the tribe’s requests for data for two years. The show of legal force resulted in a post-meeting meeting between tribal officials and several officials with Avista on Tuesday, he and Avista officials said.

Bruce Howard, relicensing manager for Avista, said Wednesday the utility “has conducted a number of studies relating to conditions that existed prior to the construction of the Post Falls Dam.”

Howard said the type of study, called a natural hydrograph situation, “looks at what would be the impacts if there was no dam. There is some water quality modeling, some wetlands mapping based on some historical maps.”

The information, he said, has been presented to various technical working groups during the two years of dam relicensing discussion. But, Howard said, Avista feels the free-flowing river scenario is unrealistic and chose not to include it as a dam-operation choice on its license application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The application is due by July, and Avista is hustling to get a draft application published by January in time for the required three months of review and subsequent tweaking, if needed.

“There was a lot of discussion yesterday around the document we are putting out, the early draft,” Howard said. The Coeur d’Alene Tribe and several other stakeholder groups had asked that the draft contain an analysis of a free-flowing river, Howard said.

These comments, along with a list of stakeholders including Lake Coeur d’Alene property owners, kayakers, the farming Hutterian Brethren and model boat clubs, can be found on the Web at www.avistautilities.com/resources/relicensing.

“I’ve been very frank from early on,” Howard said. “From an operating point of view, the natural hydrograph model is not likely” and is not included in the draft application.

“My understanding is that the tribe does not oppose the way we operate the Post Falls Dam, but they believe it is important to see what the impacts have been,” Howard said.

Funke, the tribal attorney, agreed. Noting the wide range of often conflicting interests among the stakeholders, he said, “We are not opposed to people having those objectives or those interests. We just want to know: What are the effects of water storage?”

To know that, he said, the tribe needs some sense of what the river and lake were like before the dam.

“We are not trying to drive this to any particular place,” Funke said. “We want to make an informed decision whether to support the storage. The Federal Power Act requires power companies using tribal lands for water storage to pay a reasonable annual fee.”

The Coeur d’Alenes, Funke said, receive no payments from Avista. The tribe has broached the topic several times, he said.