BPA changes need to be scrapped

If the Bush administration was floating a trial balloon with its proposal to shift Bonneville Power Administration power to market rates, there should have been no surprise in seeing it come under fire immediately.

The Energy Department wants to raise power rates by 20 percent a year over three years to bring BPA's rates closer in line with market rates.

Fat chance.

Lawmakers across the region immediately attacked the proposal. The Flathead Electric Cooperative leadership estimated the proposal would cost the local utility as much as $20 million a year. That translates to much higher rates for everybody from soccer moms to Main Street businesses to Plum Creek Timber Co.

In Washington and Oregon, states where most power is purchased from BPA, a shift to market power rates would translate to job losses in the tens of thousands.

Besides, as anyone paying an electric bill can tell you, the cost-based rates just aren't that low. Major customers of BPA have been worried enough to start negotiating with Bonneville to try for 20-year contracts to lock in low rates. That should tell the folks back in D.C. there isn't a whole lot of "give" left in the system.

Certainly there are few, if any, people supporting the proposal in the Northwest and that's something that the Republican administration is not likely to miss.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., could see the proposal had a short life span the day it was unveiled, and said so. It is "politically untenable," said Domenici, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

We also question whether a shift to market-based pricing would be as simple as flipping a light switch.

Cost-based pricing is an element of the Northwest Power Act of 1980, which established a partnership between Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and the BPA, representing the federal government. Shifting to market rates might require a revision of the act itself, according to Bruce Measure, a Kalispell attorney and one of Montana's newly appointed members of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.

BPA and its network of hydroelectric dams in the Northwest have been bought and paid for several times over, with improvements and environmental mitigation projects, by ratepayers in the Northwest - not by federal taxpayers at large.

For its own good and for the good of ratepayers across the Northwest, the Bush administration needs to scrap this proposal.