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
