Spin control: It’s time for this year’s round of ‘raid the BPA’

Monday is the day set to release the White House’s budget proposal for the coming year, which means it’s time for that annual game known as The President Wants to Raid the BPA.

About as predictable as beer commercials during the Super Bowl – although not nearly as amusing or original – a presidential budget proposal is sure to contain some idea to change the way the Bonneville Power Administration collects or spends its money. This will make Northwest members of Congress suggest he should be drawn and quartered and his head stuck on a pike above the Grand Coulee Dam.

And those are just members from his own party. Those from the opposing party will call for something more drastic.

White House budget geeks will say that Congress doesn’t understand. It’s just a simple accounting adjustment, something that will actually help the BPA, make the agency better in the long run.

No, it will raise electric rates in the Northwest, members of Congress will respond. People will have to choose between paying their electric bills and eating. They will freeze to death in the dark while munching on cat food.

The White House will persist, for a while, even though it knows that Congress gets the last word on budgets.

Which is why the White House is 0-for-everything in playing The President Wants to Raid the BPA. It has roughly the same chance as a bunch of local high school has-beens against the Globetrotters.

Note that this game is played regardless of which party is in the White House. It has been pretty much an annual event since Ronald Reagan hired J. Peter Grace to come up with ways that the federal government could save money, and one of his brainstorms was auctioning off BPA and the other power marketing agencies that operate dams and transmission lines.

Yes, this is the same guy who was chief executive officer of W.R. Grace, owners and operators of the vermiculite mine and asbestos plant in Libby, Mont. Would that J. Peter had spent more time watching what asbestos was doing to Libby and less dreaming up fire sales for the feds. But that is a separate rant.

Congress machine-gunned the “Sell BPA to the highest bidder” trial balloon when it first was floated and has continued to hold down the trigger, even though the proposals have gone from an outright auction to proposals that center around accounting maneuvers involving accelerated interest or Treasury repayment schedules.

Don’t ask. It’s like the Infield Fly Rule in baseball: you don’t have to know it to enjoy the game.

Last year’s proposal involved excess surplus power sales, so that if the dams generated more extra juice than normal – like more than $500 million worth – the overage would be redirected for other uses.

It was met with the same enthusiasm from Congress. So one might think that this year the president would wake up one morning singing “I ain’t gonna eat out my heart anymore” and leave tinkering with BPA to his successor.

The first glance at a BPA statement Friday that previews the upcoming budget might generate hope that’s exactly what he’s doing. The president’s budget, to be released on Monday, “has been substantially modified from last year to reflect concerns expressed by the Pacific Northwest congressional delegation and Bonneville Power Administration customers,” the agency announced. Instead, the budget is going to find ways to “extend BPA’s limited access to capital for infrastructure investment.”

Oh, and by the way, they aren’t going to keep claiming that the Financial Transparency and Accountability Act applies to BPA.

Hot damn. Even people who never heard of that law and don’t know what “capital for infrastructure investment” means – in other words, 99 percent of us – might think that if Congress and the customers were worried last year about rerouting money from excess power sales, the administration isn’t going to try to do that this year.

We would be wrong, of course. Apparently the White House still thinks that’s a good idea. It just wants to use that money to pay off BPA’s debt to the federal Treasury a little bit early. But rather than do this in 2008, it wants to “encourage a dialogue in the Pacific Northwest” this year, in hopes of doing that surplus power sale thing down the road.

So on Friday, which was three days before the Bush budget would see the light of day, the Northwest delegation was already warming up for this year’s game with a little dialogue of their own:

“Dead on arrival,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., of the proposal.

“Non-starter,” said Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore.

So let the game begin. But if anyone wants to bet the White House and give me Congress, I’ll give just about any odds you want.