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Deal clears way to buy Elwha dams

Dicks, Gorton and Babbitt agree on planning for their demolition

Wednesday, October 20, 1999

By MICHAEL PAULSON Mail Author
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT

WASHINGTON -- The federal government will be expected to purchase two dams on the Elwha River by the end of February and immediately begin planning how to demolish them under an agreement reached between the Clinton administration and congressional negotiators.

Three key political players -- Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt -- have agreed to a plan that clears the way for removal of at least one of the Olympic Peninsula dams.

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Dam removal was authorized by Congress in 1992 in an effort to restore diminished salmon runs on the Elwha River, but the project has been stymied by a host of political and financing problems.

"They have broken the logjam we seem to have been stuck on for a number of years," said Shawn Cantrell of the environmental group Friends of the Earth. "This is a significant breakthrough after a lot of frustrating years."

In August, Dicks hosted five key members of the House Appropriations Committee, including two subcommittee chairmen, on a tour of the Elwha River and its dams. Dicks believes the tour helped persuade the lawmakers that the Elwha is a good candidate for river restoration because most of the area has been protected as part of Olympic National Park.

The agreement moving toward getting rid of the Elwha dams is part of a national trend. For a variety of reasons, an estimated 121 dams have been removed in the United States in the past 40 years.

Some of the nation's estimated 75,000 dams have been removed because they were no longer of economic value, others because costs of bringing them up to federal standards were not worth it to the owners.

Last month, the owners of the Condit Dam on Washington's White Salmon River agreed to remove it for economic reasons. The dam's owner chose to pay the $17 million cost of removing it rather than come up with the $30 million in fish-friendly changes that would have been required for the company to renew its federal license to operate the dam.

In August, the breaching of Edwards Dam on Maine's Kennebec River marked the first time a federal agency ordered a dam removed after deciding that the cost to migrating fish denied access to upstream spawning grounds was greater than the benefit from the hydropower.

The Elwha agreement is attached to a controversial proposed budget for the Interior Department that likely will be vetoed by President Clinton. But the budget would then be rewritten, and Gorton, the chairman of the Senate Interior Appropriations Committee, and Dicks, the senior Democrat on the House Interior Appropriations Committee, have said they believe the Elwha language will remain as is.

Among the obstacles removed by negotiators: Gorton dropped his insistence that removal of the Elwha dams be linked to a promise not to remove any dams on the lower Snake River, and Babbitt dropped his refusal to buy the Elwha dams without the money in hand to demolish them.

The two Elwha River dams are owned by James River Inc. and supply electrical power to a Daishowa America paper mill in Port Angeles that, with 300 employees, is the largest employer in Clallam County.

Last year, Congress set aside $29 million for the purchase of the dams; this year, Congress is poised to set a Feb. 29 deadline for the purchase.

"The seven years that have passed without the federal government following through to acquire the dams have made business planning very challenging for Daishowa," said the company's lawyer, Harry Grant. "For that reason, Daishowa welcomes the most recent steps by Congress, which appear to make acquisition imminent. That would be a result that is good for the environment and good for our company."

As part of this year's bill, congressional negotiators have proposed providing another $12 million for the Elwha project. Half that amount would be used to protect the drinking water supply for the city of Port Angeles, which currently draws its water from the Elwha. The other half would be used to plan the dam demolition work.

Once the dams are sold, Daishowa will buy replacement electricity from the Bonneville Power Administration through Port Angeles City Light.

Still unresolved is whether to remove just the lower Elwha Dam, as Gorton wants, or to remove both the Elwha and the Glines Canyon Dam, as Dicks and Babbitt want.

And Congress has yet to come up with the money for removal, which could run as high as $110 million for both dams.

But at the moment, the parties seem content to celebrate agreeing how to acquire the dams, and seem confident that removal will follow.

"This is a major step forward . . . that will allow us to go ahead and acquire the dams and move toward dam removal over a period of time," said Dicks, whose district includes the Elwha River. "I'm very pleased that we were able to get Senator Gorton and Secretary Babbitt to agree to this language."

Babbitt declined to comment because so many other provisions of the Interior bill remain problematic for him.

But both Dicks and Gorton said Babbitt had agreed to the deal.

"Secretary Babbitt and I are now in full agreement, and I've assured Secretary Babbitt that, whether he's here or not, as long as I'm here we're going through with . . . the removal of the lower dam and the protection of the water supply for the city of Port Angeles and the preservation of the largest private employer in Port Angeles, the Daishowa mill," Gorton said.

Gorton said he remains skeptical of the value of the removal. But he pledged that even if a Republican is elected president, he will continue to support removal of the Elwha Dam because that is what local officials want.

"It is an expensive process -- my guess is it's going to cost us $60 million," he said, referring to the cost of removing just the lower dam. "I question whether the results are going to be worth $60 million, but we're going to try."

The 45-mile Elwha River, most of which is within the Olympic National Park, was dammed in 1913, when construction of the Elwha Dam was completed five miles from the river's mouth. In 1927 the Glines Canyon Dam was completed eight miles upstream from the Elwha Dam.

The dams -- illegally, according to Babbitt -- have no fish ladders, and migratory fish have been blocked from most of the river and its tributaries for decades.

Ten native Elwha River fish runs have been diminished, and at least one, the Elwha River sockeye, is thought to be extinct.

Removal of the Elwha dams has been a top priority for environmental groups, and Clinton cited the project as among his top priorities on Earth Day 1998.

But the project has dragged on, despite a lack of much direct opposition, and not everyone is so sanguine about the significance of this year's development.

"This has been going on for so long, it's hard to believe anything anybody says," said Russell Hepfer, chairman of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, which traces its creation to the river. "When the law first came out from Congress, everybody was excited, but it's been seven years. Now we've got to wait and see if it happens."

Gorton's position on the Elwha has evolved over the past several years.

Always a skeptic of the value to salmon of dam removal, Gorton last year said he would reluctantly support removal of the lower Elwha Dam in an effort to placate "environmental extremists within this administration" and as "a small price to pay" for a promise that the lower Snake River dams would not be removed without congressional authorization. But the Clinton administration refused to support any linkage between the Elwha and Snake river dams, and Gorton withdrew his offer.

This year, Gorton dropped the linkage, saying it is no longer necessary. He said he believed that the Clinton administration is backing away from its desire to remove dams on the lower Snake River, and that in any case there is not enough time in the Clinton administration to effect dam removal on the Snake.

Unlike the case of the Elwha dams, removing the Snake River dams is opposed by a variety of interests. Gorton has said breaching them would cost $251 million for the region's power supply, $9 million a year from lost irrigated farmland and $40 million in additional transportation costs, among other costs.

P-I reporter Michael Paulson can be reached at 202-943-9229 or michaelpaulson@seattle-pi.com

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