Congress rules out BPA fund transfers

Congress is about to tell the Bush administration to lay off the Bonneville Power Administration’s rate system.

The compromise version of the $94.5 billion emergency spending bill to pay for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the cleanup of last year’s hurricanes in the Gulf states includes a small section that bars the White House from proceeding with a plan to use some money from surplus power sales to reduce the deficit.

A conference committee from the Senate and the House announced it has settled on the compromise bill Thursday, and passage is all but a sure thing. A presidential veto of the full bill is unlikely.

The Bush plan to siphon off surplus power sales from BPA dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers was “a wet blanket on our economy,” said Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, the author of the section and a member of the conference committee.

“We will do whatever it takes to keep power rates low,” he said in a news release. “This is far from the first time this proposal has surfaced, but I hope the message has been delivered that Congress won’t stand for it.”

Over the years, presidents of both parties have proposed different plans that would cut into the relatively low-cost power that many Northwest homes and businesses receive from the federal dams. Most of the Spokane area receives its electricity from Avista, a private utility, but public utilities in the region get theirs from BPA.

The most recent Bush plan, announced this spring, was to use some of the money BPA earns from surplus power sales – that is, the electricity it sells to others when its regular Northwest customers don’t need more power – to pay down the deficit. Currently, BPA uses the revenues from surplus power sales to hold down regional rates.

The Office of Management and Budget proposed using anything that BPA makes above $500 million on the surplus sales for debt reduction. But members of the Northwest congressional delegation said the change in accounting could raise BPA rates by as much as 10 percent.

When members of both parties objected, BPA officials said there was nothing they could do because the redirection of funds was within the agency’s authority. They didn’t need congressional approval.

But the emergency spending bill says that for the rest of 2006 BPA can’t use any money from surplus power sales to make any payment – or even plan to make such a payment – that is greater than what was planned last winter, before the Bush proposal was announced. The restriction stays in place until at least next April 1.

Rep. Cathy McMorris, one of a group of Republicans from the Northwest that asked House members of the conference committee to accept Craig’s restriction, called it a victory for the region’s farms, businesses and families.

“It is time for the administration to recognize that we will do everything in our power to stop their efforts to unfairly target BPA,” she said in a statement.