Fiscal Year 2003 budget and Fiscal Year 2002 revisions
August 25, 2001 | document 2001-22
read full document > (240k
PDF)
Dear Interested Party:
The Council is the region's voice in balancing the need for affordable,
reliable electric power with cost-effective protection of the Columbia
Basin's fish and wildlife resources. In a sense, it is the Council's role to
be an honest broker among fish, wildlife and energy interests, developing
scientifically credible policies and recommendations to best serve the
public interest.
In Fiscal Year 2001, the Council completed a major amendment of its
Columbia River Basin Fish and
Wildlife Program to give the program an explicit scientific foundation
and consistent goals, biological objectives and strategies for action. These
will be used to give direction to locally developed action plans for each of
the 62 subbasins in the Columbia Basin. The Council's key role in regional
fish and wildlife planning is underscored in recovery planning by federal
agencies for threatened and endangered populations of fish in the Columbia
Basin. The agencies are working with the Council to develop subbasin action
plans, and the draft federal recovery planning adopts the Council's
1999 Artificial Production Review
recommendations regarding the future use of fish hatcheries.
The Council also has been investigating the reasons behind the rapid
increases in the cost of wholesale electricity on the West Coast and the
impacts of electricity industry restructuring on the region's power supply.
We have identified a substantial risk of adequacy problems in the power
supply, and we are working with the region's electric utilities, the
Bonneville Power Administration and others to develop policies that will
help the region avoid power supply and reliability problems in the future.
The Council's Fiscal Year 2003 budget is $8,425,000. In comparison, the
Fiscal Year 1995 budget was $8,460,000 and the Fiscal Year 2002 budget is
$8,339,000. This represents a relatively level budget for the next two
years. But it also reflects a total reduction of about 8 percent over a
10-year period while absorbing cumulative inflation projected at 28 percent.
The Council believes this budget is consistent with our mission to protect,
mitigate and enhance fish and wildlife affected by hydropower in the
Columbia River Basin while assuring the region an adequate, efficient,
economical and reliable power supply and involving the public in our
decision making.
Stephen L. Crow
Executive Director
 |
Documents in Acrobat PDF format
require the Acrobat reader plugin |
|
