This is Paul, her and Jennifer Sweeney of Arizona State University
interviewing Bob Lynch at his home in Phoenix, Arizona on January 20th,
2019, 2020 who we have gone into a New Year and a new decade. Thanks, Bob.
So that's a good example of, of why you're such an important person to
interview because you are. I'm glad I didn't shine my shoes. Besides, it's
not a new decade. It's the last year of the old. Well, technically it is,
but most people think it's the beginning of the new decade. But you are
right about that too. Um Why don't you just start out by um telling us
your name, the positions you held in the Adaptive Management Program in
the years that you've been involved? Well, my full name is Robert S Lynch.
I'm an attorney uh here in Phoenix, uh been a member of the bar since
August 27th, 1964.
Uh and uh I uh practice natural resources law, which is how I ended up
back here. Uh Having left law school and past the bar, been sworn in, got
in the Marine Corps, gone out of the Marine Corps into the justice
Department and then back here to work on the Central Arizona Project, uh,
I really am not part of the Adaptive Management Program. I am essentially
a spectator. Uh,
you, I don't know if you've talked to Leslie James. Yeah. Well, her
predecessor was a guy named Joe Hunter, a lobbyist who held that executive
director position. And when, uh, they were after the criteria were adopted
in 97
uh, the Bureau and Park Service people were putting together the adaptive
management work group and the technical work group and said that Creta
could have two positions on each as long as I was not either one of them.
And literally, he came and told me afterwards that he, that, that was the
deal that they got two slots to keep me away. And so I've been, uh, on the
sidelines watching, uh, well, since that started in the ni in 97 but I've
been involved in Glen Can Dam issues since the early eighties when, uh,
President Bush kicked off some of the or not Bush, um,
that would have been Ronald Reagan, but there were
issues
with regard to Glen Canny Dam and, and, and, uh, Lake Powell and the river.
And then in 92
uh, Bush 43 started who got his secretary, the chair to start the Glen
Canyon environmental stay. So that sort of formalized
but amounted to a decade of debate, uh, over what was going on and what
you know, and, and all of that. So as a practical matter of, I've been on
the sidelines, ping people, uh ever since. Well, let's talk about that a
little bit. What, um, what do you see as your role in, um, poking people
uh from the sidelines in the Adaptive Management Program? I mean, you're a
water lawyer among other things and uh kind of representing the State of
Arizona on the Adaptive Management Program, there are representatives of
each of the basin states and their water interest. Do you see yourself uh
sort of in that category of somebody watching out for those issues, state
water issues.
Well, I get involved in state water issues, but my clients are primarily
interested in the hydro private generation from Glen Canyon Dam. Uh While
there are other hydroelectric facilities in this color river storage
project, it's 70% of that and it's a major source of power for the small
entities, the utilities that I represent uh in Arizona and uh one and uh
California. And uh and so we uh uh are concerned because, you know, the
smaller you are, the more important this resource is and any particular
under the current criteria, any particular day of the week, you're leaving
600 to 800 megawatts of capacity on the table not being used, which is a
power plant, you know, and uh not to mention load following for an
enormous amount of solar or wind. If you were to restructure how
hydropower works. Uh Right now, hydropower follows load rather than
generation, but it can also fo follow generation and it can follow both
with what's called a dynamic signal and it's an electronic signal that has
sent limited number of them to each generation facility about what that
particular uh utility needs. And the uh operators at the other end have a
computer program that melds those to try to adjust uh the operation within
the parameters uh of operation of the dam. Uh And uh and Hoover, um the
parameters are driven by water supply and downstream water works. Uh Glen
Canyon, they drive, the power generation is driven by the uh 97 criteria
and the subsequent criteria in the new EIS and rot. So people have to live
within that and try to do what they can. Uh But uh things are about to get
interesting.
A lot is changing in the energy field today, isn't it? Well, it's not that
it's the lawsuit.
The uh a group of environmentalists headed up by a group called Save the
Colorado vote. The year of reclamation in July said
your environmental impact statement, recorded decision for L temp is any
good because you failed to take into account climate change, the drought
contingency plan,
couple of other things and so that dragged on. So they filed suit and the
uh Creta has intervened.
Uh I have a stack this tall that I had to get through so I can craft an
intervention for my client. Uh
And it, it, it, it's a novel issue. Everybody talks about climate change,
everybody talks about what you ought to do about this, that or the other
thing. But
to the best of my knowledge, there's one other case where the issue of
climate change, it has just been brought up this year and some litigation
out of Montana. It's still in the, just finished the pleading stage and
these two cases for the first time bring up the subject of how a dam
should be operated on a river system vis a vis climate change. Now you add
to that, that the council on environmental quality came out with draft
and then final guidance on how to deal with climate change and
environmental impact statements. Uh Last summer, I think they finalized
them in August and then came out with their proposed rewrite of certain
portions of their quote regulations unquote. Uh uh I think the comment
period on that is March 10th. And so all of a sudden you have a, a
changing field. One of the interesting aspects of that's going to be is
that ce Q regulations aren't
uh nobody talks about it, but the CE Q doesn't regulate anybody. And
there's a Court of appeals, the District Columbia case that says so
when they were originally uh formulated
uh they're called guidance, and I wrote a lot of your article about how
the agencies were responding to the cu guidance. Uh Apparently I was the
only one who did, nobody seemed to think it was important. But, um, uh
then during the Carter administration, they sort of migrated into the code
of federal regulations miraculously,
uh and it wasn't until this case was, I think, trying to remember, I think
it was decided around 1998. I forget. Um, I've been chasing too many
ghosts. Um,
where the Court of appeals said, wait a minute.
CQ doesn't regulate anybody.
You know, they're an advisory body and the Executive Officer of the White
House, you can put these things in the code of federal regulations if you
want to, but then they're not regulations. Well,
for one reason or another, that's
not really
got a lot of traction.
But
uh
with this issue of climate change and ce Q
jumping into that in the context of N A, uh it is gonna get much more.
It's just like the old Chinese curse. May you live in? Interesting times.
No, this is, this is gonna be, it's gonna be huge and, and, and people
don't understand, you know, uh
I'm not even sure the attorneys involved understand how big of a watershed
an issue this is. But we'll find out uh interesting enough, the judge to
which the case was assigned is the former general counsel of the governor.
We used to be a litigator at Snow and Wilmer
and then after his tour at the governor office, uh, with another firm, a
national firm here, their local office. Uh,
we
see what he does with it. How do you think the issue of climate change or
the reality of climate change? Ha, what kind of potential does it have to
affect management decisions at Glen Canyon Dam? And on the Colorado River
, you said, do you think it could be a big deal in what way? Well, it
depends what the judge does for the case. You know, having filed the
lawsuit,
the uh
issue about to manage that issue has basically been taken away from the
executive branch and given to the judicial branch and
the judge will examine
neighbor. Uh Interestingly enough, the draft new draft NP A quote regs
unquote say that they can be applied to ongoing
activities.
Well,
and w is enough ongoing activity.
Uh What they do to the subject of
dealing with alternatives, dealing with
uh
impacts like climate change. I mean, you have to say to yourself, uh what
can they do about it? You know, what does operating
reservoirs on the Colorado River have to do with climate change? You have
to react to what is happening for whatever reason, it doesn't make any
difference, what the reason is, you have to react to the, to that. And
so what do you do about it? And uh
that normally would be an executive decision underneath us in the process
of giving advice to a decision maker here, the secretary of the chair. But
now we're in court with the same questions being asked
and come. May, we will start the annual operating plan process um
for the Colorado River again. And I'm involved in that and this last
iteration, but just got signed here before it and signed the last July of.
But uh they'll start this process again this spring. And I've even
suggested to them that instead of waiting until May, they ought to start
earlier. But it typically has three consultations in May, July and
September and they put something together and give it to the secretary and
then he approves it and that's the operating plan for the next year for
this.
A op
not only does not discuss climate change, it doesn't discuss DC P. So the
drought contingency plan. So I'm uh I'm, I'm, it's going to be an
interesting spring because, because uh it's gonna be interesting to see uh
what people think they have to talk about in terms of. Well, part of it is
hydrology driven and, and the report itself uh is, is based on the August
24 month study and then the January 24 month study that just came out. And
then ultimately for the rest of that calendar year, the April 20 month
study, which is the end of March data right now, the predictions
uh well, where we are now is we've had a very good fall and winter. So far.
Oh, dear. Sorry about that. We were gonna unplug that thing, were we? I
forgot. Yeah,
you want to pause for just a second. It's all right. And can you answer
that and get rid of whoever it is?
That was a long ring. That last one? Oh, by the way, it's, those are all,
uh, solicitation, solicitation goes, that's all right. They gave up.
So, if you don't mind, can we go back to something you said near the
beginning? Uh go ahead and pause,
resume recording. If you don't mind, let's go back to something you said
near the beginning of the interview, you mentioned that you have a number
of clients who are interested in hydropower in the Columbia River Basin,
Colorado River, Colorado River Basin. Did I say Columbia? Yeah, I used to
live in Washington State so it just came out of me. Um So the Glen Canon
Dam Adaptive Management Program is, is in essence, it's a collection of
stakeholders trying to solve complex problems. And there are people who
represent hydropower interests, water supply interests, wildlife interests
, recreation interests, and National Park tribal interests. Um Could you
tell us a little bit more about um if you don't want to reveal your
clients, at least what, what you represent, what you bring to the Adaptive
Management Program in terms of your interests, what you're hoping to
achieve in being involved. Well, I represent a state association,
most of whose members by power from
the western area. Power administration generated among at other places
other than Glen Canyon Dam up and down the river, but including Glen
Canyon Dam and it is, and they're primarily small uh agriculturally based
or rural towns. Uh And uh is this Creta? No, no, no, a different
organization? Creta is a regional uh association, six states. But the
types of entities uh that are in crete are the same types of entities that
are in my state association, except that most of the ones we have are, are
very small and creed are, uh a number of them are quite large. Um And
I, uh I mean, our, some of our people also get water off the Colorado
River through the Central Arizona project and some of them get water off
the river because they have their own water, right? Like the folks down in
Yuma. And so
we're one of the few places in the co in the country where you sort of
meet yourself coming and going that, that you have people that are both in
the Colorado River water business and the Colorado River Power business.
And so you have to be aware of the synergism uh of decision making. Uh You
, you can see that the Central Arizona Central Valley project in
California.
Oh, oh, dear. Um And uh
uh hit the pause button. I'm afraid that's the, I'm going to do the same
thing I did last time resuming recording.
All right. Well, we were talking about the intersection of, of water
impair issues. And uh in Arizona, we have an almost but not quite unique
situation where an awful lot of the entities that buy power from the dams
on the Colorado River also get water uh either through their own
organization or sister organizations formed for that purpose. So, uh you
have to, you have to see both sides of every impact. Uh and it, and it
unlike most of the country where most of the West in reclamation projects
where uh you have water customers here and you have power customers over
on the other side, they aren't the same people and there is constant
tension between them over who's paying for what and who's getting what.
And uh and uh it's just the nature of the beast. So, but uh power P bills
on these projects, 95% of the bills of the Colorado Restorage project are
paid by hydropower sales. And so it's a
something most people,
especially if they're water or environmental people don't want to talk
about, but it is a cruel reality that you have to keep an eye on what the
hydropower costs and
uh who's, you know, are there people willing to still buy it? Uh And, and
the interesting thing about that is that, that fracking has changed the
whole dynamic of power business. NA O Generating station is not closing
for environmental reasons. It's closed, it's already closed. Uh because it
was no longer economical, it was cheaper to buy power at the Palaverde hub
west of Phoenix than it was to run the plant. And uh other forces like
that, gradually
wind and commercial wind and commercial solar, uh not rooftop solar um are
getting cheaper and competing with other resources in terms of price.
Their problem is that you can't schedule them. They either happen because
the sun is shining or the wind is blowing or they don't. Uh And uh I
remember driving to church one Sunday and a cloud came over the sky and I
said to Anne, my wife, a PS and SRP are ramping up. Then the cloud went
away and the sun came out again and I said, now they're ramping down and
then, you know, and it went back and forth like that. So we got in the
parking lot. But it was true. The, the every time that cloud went between
the sun and the earth, the utilities had to change what they were doing.
They, because the electricity
that would have otherwise been generated by the, the solar arrays quit. Uh
So the complexities of what we do in the power business now are, are
monumental compared to what they were 20 years ago. And sort of, you know
, but when we were talking about Glen Canyon Dam criteria
uh and stuff like that and what it meant and what it would do to your
power portfolio and this that and the other thing, you know, we're in a
different world. Yeah, I imagine you've seen a lot of changes over time
over the last uh three decades or so since the Adaptive Management Program
began. Can you think back and reflect a little bit on what kinds of
relationships between the stakeholders, the interest groups? There were in
the early years, um who was, you know, in conflict with who over what and
how maybe that evolved over time as things began to change. Well,
the uh the river is driven by water,
the river is driven by the 1922 compact, the A Probation compact,
Arizona V California,
uh and other stuff. Collectively, the law of the river. Uh the 1930
B. Can your project regulations, the uh long-range operating criteria. Now
the shortage criteria, the interim shortage criteria, all of this stuff uh
and some other lawsuits, you know, but it's a huge collection of stuff and
power
to most people is incidental
to all the rest of this. And they keep saying yes, this law says in power
generation incidental there too, but the incidental there too is the
checkbook and everybody has always been able to assume that the power was
cheaper than everything. It wasn't actually uh um when the commissioner of
reclamation testified in Congress about building a Colorado storage
project. He could, he said I can sell this parrot six mills for 50 years
and build everything that's in here, the main stem reservoirs, the
satellite projects, everything.
Well, CoFire statements, 4.5 million. So that's a, that's a very big
difference. You know, it doesn't sound like much when you're talking about
mills, you know, percentages of a penny. But when you multiply it by
what's being generated, you're talking,
today's price is 250 million a year. Um, and 70% of that from Glen Canyon
Dam for this particular project. Um So that, you know, the the multiplier
effect is huge as long as everybody's buying the power. And in over
decades,
uh it was just automatically assumed that the cheapest buyer you could
possibly get uh was federal hydro power because that six mils being more
than 4.5 mils for coal-fired steam didn't last very long. It wasn't, the
six mils changed, the 4.5 mils changed dramatically. And so all of a
sudden uh all the Cider power, the, the stuff that was already there.
Hoover and Davis and Parker Parker Davis project look better and better
and better. And uh
and the Colorado of storage project power got into a position where it
looked better and better and better. Uh Interestingly enough of those, th
those are the three major hydropower generating uh projects on the river.
And among them only Parker Davis is
below market
crisp and Hoover are above market. You can buy power cheaper P Verde gov
than you can buy it from the government
from Hoover Dam or Glen Canyon and the other dams north of there. But
people do it to the extent it provides operational flexibility.
Uh Way back when this decision making process was getting started,
we had a group of us in the control center for the Canyon dam with the
congressman who this was 1993 was the ranking member of the House Energy
Water Development subcomittee that, that appropriates the money for
reclamation. And whoa.
And then after the 94 election, he became the sub-committee chairman uh
with the switch
and it's down in the middle of the dam. And
uh right in the middle of the room when the the reclamation was in charge
of the facility, was there explaining things to him and that sort of thing.
And there's a bank of, of generators on the side, generator controls on
the side. And in the middle of the room there is, oh jeez, I'm sorry,
resuming recording well. So we were in the control room and in the middle
of the control room is a desk and on the desk is a red phone and there is
a young man sitting behind the desk and the dam manager is explaining
everything to this congressman and the phone rings
and the young man picks it up and he listens and he puts it down and he
walks over to the wall and he starts punching a button on one of the units
bringing it off spinning reserve and a coal-fired unit in Northwestern
Colorado had tripped off for some reason and the entire system in the
Colorado River Basin was out of balance. And in the time it takes to tell
this story, he had rebalanced the entire system. Oh, that's
incident hydropower to everything else. Thank you. But if he hadn't been
able to do that, the system would have burned down electricity generates
heat. That's why there are insulators. That's why there are are uh uh
circuit breakers uh like the one that maybe fall there in my hot tub. Um
And I never had to explain to the congressman again what the value of Glen
Canyon Dam and hydro power was because it is uh it's not a black start
facility. Uh That, that Hoover is, it can fill in and go from nothing to
jump into the middle of a problem. But uh
it uh it, it plays an enormously big role in helping regulate
electricity fluctuations in this whole interconnected system because it's
of its size. And uh and so while the hydropower is quote, incidental,
close quote to water and whatever, um
it's not incidental. If your lights go up uh
in the summer of 2001 before 911,
it was very hot and some power lines in Eastern Idaho overloaded as they
do. And when they do, they sag and because of
all these issues with regard to deregulation and everything, one of the
things that a lot of utilities cut back on was tree training. And so these
wires sagged into a cottonwood tree arced and that pulse went to Boise and
the guys of Boise Idaho couldn't react and it went into the vulnerable
power administration system where there are no checks down the Colorado
Oregon transmission project line to northern California down to L A over
here. By the time I got here,
uh
the uh uh
bureau had ramped Glen Canyon Dam in our lights. We get so project powers
, we get power from black you down. Our lights stayed on, go to the other
side of seventh A, their lights went out. It's a PS. Um Two weeks later,
same thing happened, but the S A was on the cotp going from Grand coolly
down in Northern California.
At that point, Glen Ken was
100% because they were rolling blackouts in California and there was no
other, there's no other power. And so our lights went out as well because
there was nothing to throw at the problem. But people don't understand,
you know that from British Columbia to Northern New Mexico, this is all
connected
and, and the problems, for instance, they're having in California now
really uh can have an impact on us. Uh And
while California turns its nose up at resources outside the state, it
doesn't when the lights go out and they're gonna go out again this summer.
Uh So we're in a, as you say, we're in a different world and, and not one
I would have chosen, but uh one I think that bears for the reflection on
how people view the hydropower
uh generated a Glen Canyon dam. It has been the whipping boy during this
entire process. You know, it's bad. The dam is bad, the hydropower is bad.
Uh And
uh and I have waited a very long time for some
precipitating cause that would force perhaps a recalculation of
the, all the values of things. And oddly enough, I think this lawsuit by
the environmentalists may be that precipitating cause because it's, uh
it's gonna examine
what and what he's been doing
and whether it's been doing it correctly and the environmentalists are
saying, no, you haven't. This group of environmentalists, I
would love to see a poll among environmental groups as to which of them,
which of them like this idea of this lawsuit, which of them don't, the
more sophisticated ones I think probably don't like it at all because it's
, as I said, it's taking decision making away from the executive branch
and putting it in the judicial branch, but we'll see where it goes. In the
meantime, you gotta keep the lights on.
What do you think um, in the years that you've been involved, do you think
you've been able to accomplish anything in particular in terms of keeping
the importance of hydro power on the table? Maybe making so having some
influence on decisions that are made about, you know, operation of the dam.
Oh,
so uh the, when this all really got rolling, uh a professor from a su and
a couple of people took some readings from 40 L that's a beach. Uh and
said the sky is falling. We gotta have emergency criteria and interior
went along with it and I yelled and screamed and whatnot. And then we got
to the 97 criteria and some of the more onerous things of those emergency
criteria, things went away. I think, I like to think in part because they
thought I was gonna sue him. And,
you know, as I said before, you know, I mean, could you be more specific
about what was in the emergency criteria that you thought was not a good
idea and how, that the restrictions I'm glad were, were, were tighter,
more severe than what we ended up with in the 97 criteria. And the problem
with the 97 criteria, for instance, that the, uh, the, one of their, their
five controls, there's uh, uh, a minimum or maximum up ramp, down ramp and
daily change. All right, there's no scientific evidence for what they have
in the way of an up criteria. The problem is that when they looked
themselves in the face and said,
what do we do with this? Uh, it was not 14,000 and the more nuanced
version of that concept in the new decision making. But they had to come
up with something they couldn't bear politically saying, well, the five
criteria, we don't really need this one. And as a practical matter, what
they did was set the criteria, the criterion for up ramping or criteria
under different water flows, for criteria for up ramping. So that it
didn't make any difference. If the daily change is 6000 to 8000, then the
ramping up ramping doesn't make any difference because you eat it in an
hour or two and that's not load following. And uh uh so it, it, it really
doesn't mean anything but time. I'm, I don't know if I live long enough,
but uh I want to live to the point where people begin to think that maybe
there's a win, win situation in this, you know, they do these artificial
floods,
they don't do anything. I mean, I've been there, I've been on the river,
I've had been on the river seven times starting in the seventies. I was on
the river on a private trip in 2000 when they flattened the river. And I
was in the um and uh in 2008 when they started the experimental flows, the
floods which of course deeply incised the edges of the beaches so that you
could hardly get onto them until it, it eroded. And every time they do one
of those floods, the sand goes back in the river in about six months,
almost all because the flood can only put the sand up high enough
to where the water is. And therefore,
as the water withdraws and it dries out. But there is subs uh subsurface
erosion. It loses its support and it falls back into the river. And so it
really is, it's not beach building. Uh There are 100 and 10 camping
beaches between Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Mead. Virtually all of them in
the lower river are as big or bigger than they were before Glen Canyon Dam
was built. Uh There's a park service, photographic study that uh uh was
done to mimic one that was uh p did uh under contract to try to map a
railroad to the river along the river and they did it on the each spot was
the very same day, very time, same time of day and everything and the,
the amount of area of the river that is exactly the same is striking and
nobody wants to talk about it. The park service in Tucson has this
photographic study comparison 100 years to the day of each of those two.
And the real problem is Marble Canyon. It's,
yeah.
Um maybe 75% narrow uh configuration.
It's configured to channel the normal westerly flow of winds. I know I've
gotten a nasty sunburn from sand blowing in my face in Marble Canyon and
lost a nice hat that said cords on it. To the river and my pillow because
it, you know, it, it, that wind can get pretty fierce in that narrow. But
even out of the old criteria, 31 and 31,503
in the summer and one in the winter before the 97 criteria
in the narrowest reach of, of Marble Canyon, the change in water level was
10 ft. That's all. And you can tell and you can tell pre damn, uh, there'd
be scouring floods up to 300,000 cfs and some at 100. And you can go down
there and you can see the striations of vegetation where those lines are
and, uh, you'll see trees above 300,000, you'll see some shrubs down and
then you'll go down below. But, uh, and you get down into where we are now
and the maximum fluctuation is 3 ft instead of 10 ft and then from 3 to 10
, there are grasses and, uh, uh, salt cedar, uh, until the bugs get them.
Uh, and, uh, uh,
and that's where the problem is that the real problem? And it's an
engineering problem, uh, in my view, instead of trying to, you know,
Einstein's definition of insanity was repeating the same thing over and
over again and expecting a different result. Well, they've been doing this
, you know, these artificial floods, expecting a different result. The
ones they do in the spring excite the rainbow trout. They reproduce more
they then outcompete or they compete with and eat a back job. Uh, I mean,
the, the, the studies are there, they've been done it. It's the fatal flaw
of the spring. HFE, the Fhfes screw other things up. Uh, and you, you
could go down there with some civil engineers and a survey crew. I used to
work on a survey crew in high school where the transit in a level and
stake out the 40,000 CFS line.
The Bureau of Reclamation's got dredges on the lower Colorado river. They
go through the National Wildlife rages blowing sand out of the river at
the request of the fish and wildlife service to keep the channels open. Uh
And it works and you can break them down, put them on trucks, drive them
through the tunnel, uh Put them on pontoon boats, reassemble them. You're
down to where you need to purchase sand when the sand is accumulated and
put it together again. You put the, the son are bell in the water and give
it a beep and scare the fish away. You shoot the sand up to the grade
stakes. Um
The, you know, you break everything down, pull the shutter belt out, go up
, pick up great steaks, float down the river. And the only people who know
that you were even there are the river runners and you'll have a beach
that will be there 100 years,
which is, you know, I mean that that's fine. What you're doing is
promoting a, a business, commercial river running. And, uh, uh, uh, I mean
, the, the small group of people who do private trips
get along with whatever there is but the co, you have to have a comfort
zone for commercial overrun and you have to have beaches that are nice and
you can do that and it wouldn't do anything for the backwaters. But our
back job don't use the backwaters anyway. And besides, they freeze over in
the fall. And when they're not frozen over the water, birds eat the fish
that are there because it's shallow. I mean, this stuff is in the record.
Uh Can you explain briefly um why hydropower interests are
not enamored with the idea of the high flow events? Why, why would you not
want the high flow events to continue? Is that because the water doesn't
go through the turbine and generate electricity when there's an HFE? Ok.
It costs them money. It cost their customers money. And
if they work, that would be one thing. But when the sand falls back in the
river and the other aspect of it is it does fall back in the river, then
they do another one. Guess where that sand goes. It goes to the Lake Mead
before they started. This is a little bit of sand up at the head of Lake
Mead. Now there's a huge
sandbar up there quixotically full of salt, cedar and Southwester will
flycatcher, which isn't playing the game fairly and his nesting in salt
cedar, uh which is not the script it's supposed to follow. And, and so you
have this, this tension now over uh the whole thing, but the, this that
great big sandbar didn't exist before. We're pulsing sand down toward Lake
Mead. We're shortening the life of Lake Mead, its ability to store water
without being dredged, which is wow. And then dredging a reservoir is an
environmental nightmare because of heavy metals and everything else that
settles in the bottom of reservoirs. It's the nature of the beast. And uh
and you can't very well sluice that stuff downstream without sluicing all
of those uh uh polus downstream. Uh And uh so uh to me, uh we, we, we
could get a win, win out of this, that's there.
But it would, it would need for people to alter and mindset and we've had
this mindset go through what, how many generations, I mean, think of the
people who started working on this in the Glen Cannon environmental
studies.
And
that's what, 4050 years, 29 years ago, 1992 all the environmental studies
began in the early 19 eighties and discussions about the problems
associated with the d even before that. Yeah. So, I mean, really, you're
talking about three decades. So you get people who have uh literally
graduated college,
had a career and a retired.
Uh
And you have young people coming along and I find myself dealing with
people's grandchildren. Uh, and I start saying, well, you know, in 1970
and they look at me, uh, or, or, or not even that far back. But, but, uh,
uh, what's the change of mind frame that you said is needed in order to
get a win, win situation? People have to accept the fact that you have to
do something mechanical
in the Grand Canyon. Now,
that's two lives
coupled together. First of all, you don't need to do it in the Grand
Canyon, you do it in Marble Canyon. And second, this isn't the only
mechanical thing that's done. Uh
In spite of what people from primarily the park service and the
environmental community will say, uh in the quote Grand Canyon, the
general term usually used for everything from Glen Canyon Dam to Lake Mead.
Um If I mean, they put helicopters down there when they need to both for
rescue and for whatever other t they do, uh uh a kind of harvesting of
exotic fish. Um
They, uh there is a mound of sand at the toe of Glen Canyon Dam which is
causing back pressure on its operation
and they are actively considering having to dredge
that out of there, which means they'd have to get one of those dredges.
I'm talking about that. The bureau has break it down, put it on the trucks
, take it through the tunnel, put it on. Um uh, you know, uh, uh,
reassemble it or put it on now, they probably have to put it on the, on
the, on the boats and then re, and drive up a little bit to reassemble it
and then use it to, to try to sluice that, that sand mounted away. I've
been there. I fished it. Uh, and it's a, it's a significant operational
issue. Uh, it's mechanical.
The stuff they do about exotic fish is mechanical. Uh,
we could do the sand preservation for commercial
river running in Marble Canyon where it's the only place where it would
really be helpful.
One trip, we get that sand perched above a 40,000 CFS line, which should
be in the very narrowest part of the canyon. 10 ft
float everything down the river, come back in 100 years.
The, the only thing you could be fixing at that point is wind erosion and
, uh, uh, and it would work but people go nuts when you say things like
that to them because it's the Grand Canyon. It's a wilderness. Well, it's
not a wilderness.
Um,
and yet if you did that, you wouldn't have to do the artificial floods.
They, you wouldn't be worried about their adverse impacts on the
endangered Humpback chub. And then you, uh,
I don't know about bug flows in the fall. Uh, that's a new recent
phenomenon. Uh, you know, they plant rainbow trout from time to time. You
know, the ferry fishery I don't know why they can't plant bugs instead of
flattening the river on the weekends. Uh, it's not as economically
consequential as doing things during the week, but it is more
consequential in the summer when in pair is needed. But, and, and it
seemed to me that if you can raise fish and put them in the river, you can
raise bugs and put them in the river and it's awful lot cheaper than not
generating electricity. But, but you gotta have the mindset to say, let's
let's think outside the box. Let's see. Can we have our cake and eat it
too? Can we take this hydropower resource back toward what it was designed
to be because of the benefits that can generate for just this load
following for supporting wind and solar, getting people off of carbon
resources.
Can can, can we think about this hydropower facility is very important to
other policy issues that have now arisen and people are beginning to
coalesce around that, that we need to have a more carbon free environment.
And there is a role for hydropower to play in that existing hydropower
primarily because most of the big dams that will ever be built in western
United States have been built. Uh And that's just the way, that's the way
life is uh
in part because you know, there aren't that many more dam sites worth
considering.
But until people think, you know,
improving hydro Peric Glen Canyon dam is worth trying. Can we marry
mitigating downstream impacts and innovation
with that and see if we can make it work, can we? I don't know, I, I mean
, I think you can, I think there are, are, are available solutions. I, I
don't think it's rocket science. I think their current applications of
engineering and in, in biology that can be applied. I think that power
customers, for instance, uh
who, who fund, which fund so much of this if they were not losing $5
million a day. And Hyder Barlo, I'd be very happy to spend $500,000 bugs.
You know, I, I mean, it's economics. Uh but I, but you have to have the
mindset that looks at the whole picture and says g is there a way we can
do this for everybody? It's the way, you know, instead of fighting with
each other instead of bad mouthing each other. Is, is there a path forward
on this, that, that where everybody went? Uh And, and
yeah, I don't know if that's possible. Yeah. Well, that's, that is exactly
the purpose of uh adaptive management program. It's kind of an
experimental effort to bring all the stakeholders together to see if you
can find collaboratively agree on, on as many win wins as possible. It's
experimental and it's an alternative, the normal way of making decisions.
I wonder. And, you know, we can kind of wrap up this interview with this,
I wonder Um If you think that adaptive management as an alternative way of
making decisions about resources is kind of a successful experiment or
more of a muddle that hasn't really accomplished what it sought out to
accomplish. What are your feelings about adaptive management? And what
particular, let me ask you this question, what does it accomplish?
That's why I'm interviewing experts like you, uh some people think a lot
has been accomplished, other people feel frustrated. I'm wondering what
you feel about it.
You know, democracy is messy, of course, and slow and frustrating
sometimes better than everything else. Exactly. But, well, let's put it
this way. Uh, under the old regime, we didn't have green sunfish, uh,
under the old regime while the fish and wildlife service had wrote on the
river and created the endangered fish problem, uh,
and put brown trout, german, brown trout. They're from Germany because
they are hard to catch. They fight like hell. Uh, and they mostly camped
out in Bright Angel Creek and in the river right around there. Now they're
migrating up and the people who make a living off the leaf fry fishery
with the, uh, rainbows,
uh, are very unhappy. Uh, I mean, just like they were when the, when the
game fish department put cat loops, it's a type of rainbow trap
strain in there and nobody could catch. And so they put Bel Airs in there
and they're really stupid. And, uh, yeah, and a biologist friend of mine
said that they should have put it in Rocky Mountain. It's a different
strain. But the point is it's a fish that's native to the west slopes of
the, uh, uh, Sierra Nevadas, Northern California and southern Oregon. And
it's not native here. We have two native trout. Neither of them were in
the Colorado River. It was a warm water river. They're in the, uh, uh,
blew the San Francisco
in the little Colorado, the Apache and the hela. Uh, and, uh, they're not
very bright either. Uh, they're much easier to catch. But, uh, the, um,
the, the, the problem is that, that we just
look at this and say, all right. Now, now we've got, we've got Humpback
chub populations in some of the side streets. The original target for
delisting comeback job was 3000,
uh, reproducing adults. We're at nine
fish and Wildlife Service is struggling with itself over down listing.
This population
too threatened, not de listing down listing, uh, because
it's the Grand Canyon. It's politics and the politics is, is interfering
with. Well, it should have been a science call
15 years ago. Um,
and, and eventually maybe we'll get there. I don't know if this lawsuit is
gonna screw that up or not. But, uh,
we, uh, we have environmental problems. Now. We didn't have, I caught
striped bass at the mouth of Havasu Creek on one of our trips with the
Bureau of reclamation. As did a Bureau of reclamation guy. And Dave Wagner.
What happened? Oh, I'm sorry, I unplugged it. But go ahead. Resuming
recording. Well, you know,
David, I work nemesis. Uh,
and, uh, Nemesis, you said, yes,
he had his own idea about how he was doing things and I wasn't
particularly fond of the direction he was taking things. But, and there's
, uh, you can come back for another four hours and we'll talk about my
relationship with David, but I still see him from time to time and we
commiserate. I used to see him when he went
up on the hill in the minority staff for the Transportation subcomittee.
And my daughter's or middle daughter who called was Chief counsel of the
crime terrorism and Homeland Security subcomittee. And her office was
right across the hall and then there was another sub-committee right next
to her. So I could go into the basement of the red room building and get a
three for uh uh but, um, uh,
no. Um, to me, I mean, what David, let us, what we did is he made us clean
the fish bag, the trails, put them on ice
with a striped bass snack
before dinner. Uh, and that stuff went back uh to have the scientist poke
around and see what they were reading. But if those fish had portaged lava
,
I mean, think about it. Um, and, and striped bass are, and then abnormous
fish
uh
native to the Atlantic Ocean and among other places, rivers uh that flow
into the Atlantic Ocean from the United States and uh were brought to the
West because they're great sports fish.
I caught a £60.01 in San Francisco Bay when I was eight. Actually, it
caught me and my father and the boat captain got a board and they had to
whack the thing and kill it before we get a board for fear, it would bite
somebody's leg off and then
to get back to officers quarters. Uh My father was briefly stationed in
the initial arsenal. Um,
took great big chunks of the filet, threw it in the bathtub, poured ice
over, it, took the head, put it out the empty lot next door that had a
post on it. The bees took care of that. They went around trying to give
fish away but strike bass are a wonderful fighting fish and wonderful
sports fish and wonderful eating fish.
But they are the freshwater sharks of the United States and they're in
Lake Mead and they're in Lake Powell for that very reason. And if you
create a climate
uh between Blake Canyon Dam and Lake Mead for them, there won't be any
more her picture or rainbow trap or even Brown trap because they will
dominate everything. It's, they're like golden, the golden eagles. I mean
, everybody says, oh, the bald eagle, bald eagle. Uh The only reason of
the golden eagle is not the symbol of the United States is, it was the
symbol of Germany before then when they were trying to decide. But I, the
, the golden eagle dominates the vault and I have a net whet creek seat
which is,
oh, middle Granite Gorge coming in from the north side and it's a spawning
area for rainbow trout. And I have seen bald eagles sitting standing
alongside the creek fishing
and the golden eagle come down in the bald eagle sleeve.
And of course,
the Grand Canyon was never natural habitat for eagles of any kind, uh,
until they introduced the rainbow trout. Uh, but, uh, but it's, that's how
big a threat, uh,
striped Nasar to that ecosystem. Uh, there are, uh, well,
nobody can explain how the green sunfish got. The lady of the local Glen
Canyon Dam. They have tried to poison it out. They've done this, done that.
It, it, they haven't fixed the, uh, uh, they have figured out why
the german brown trout are migrating north up the river. And, uh, they got
another fish problem up in Cataract Canyon, uh, the, uh,
Asian Carp
and it's a breeding population. My biologists that I use, tell me it's
only a matter of time before they get down below the dam. They, uh, live a
very long time. They eat everything. I mean, they moss and whatnot,
plankton
and fish. Uh, they're used in the suburb project system and the triploid
are used in the suburb project system in every lake on every golf course
here. And we uh we were using diploids here and some of them started
breeding and they were being purchased from hatcheries in Arkansas and
passed a law that I got involved in uh to require triple H and I had to go
drain uh everything to get rid of these fish. And
in the part of the Arizona canal that runs through sunny slope, we had all
these Vietnamese come in and settle up there and they were draining this
and trying to capture these fish. And every time the SRP guys turned
around, they go down and steal the fish. I mean, it's Asian car Mekong
river. Hello. Uh it was, it was dinner. They couldn't believe it. And uh
but now we have tripods and uh and they work and that's fine but not cat
how they got in cataract Canyon. God only knows that they're there and we
have all these threats. Now, these are warm water species.
The water comes out of the dam at what 5052
uh when they flattened the river in 2000, we bathed in the river
while camp at a beach in Middle Grata Gorge. It was that warm. That's not
good. We, you can't have it. You can't flatten the river. And yet some
people think flattening the river is, in fact uh the solution, but it
can't be because if you warm that river, nature is going to create a
habitat that these other species will want to occupy. It's a basic
principle of biology as I'm sure you're aware that a species will occupy
whatever habitat it can, it's suitable for it. And, uh, and, and, and, and
so we, you know, I mean, ever since this whole thing started every time we
fiddled with something,
there's the law of unintended consequences has reared its ugly head. Salt
Cedar. When we first started floating the river in the seventies private
trips, there was her Lady Salt Cedar Italy ferry. Um And, and now there's
this huge busky.
Uh
so they get this bill and then put it on the salt cedar and the Virgin
River and it does its job and they thought, all right, it'll eat its way
down the Virgin River and die and just go away and be nice. So now it's
gradually working its way up to Colorado, but the Southwester Little
flycatcher is nesting. You know, it's not playing the, the script, you
know, with the script properly and it's nesting in the salt sea. It's
adapting. Uh And that is now created, you know, yet another problem and
all of this fiddling
uh head heads to me,
put in question this
the way people think in this adaptive management work group, everybody has
their own agenda, everybody's pushing their own aspect of things and their
own personal belief and
nobody's looking at an overall picture. I mean, we've been think how many
decades we've been at this and we don't have a solution. This is what you
said, it's an experimental program. When does the experiment end? When do
you get solutions? When can you say uh ha we have been conducting
experiments here for 40 years and we now have solutions. This is what we
ought to do. We're not anywhere near there. You can't even get the people
who go to the meetings to agree
on, on a particular strategy other than doing the next study and, and, and
, and, you know, uh that's what scientists like to do. God love them. But
uh if we're gonna,
if we're gonna get somewhere,
somebody's got to take control of this situation and shape it toward some
realistic future to me. And that's what's missing it. It, it, it, it, it,
there's no,
there's no control here. It just, it's amorphous and, and uh everybody's
study is fine. I mean, who's gonna criticize somebody else's study?
Because then if you do that, then when you do your study, they'll
criticize yours. It's one of the problems you have with peer review is you
got to be very careful about what you say about somebody else's work. You
know, one of the things lawyers don't have to put up with, you know, we
don't expect other lawyers to compliment us on our work nor do should they
expect us to compliment them? And, you know, if you can't stand the heat,
get out of the kitchen. Uh, the, the being a lawyer is a, is a, is a
process of, of confrontation. And, but
to me, the whole thing just
isn't pointed toward a result. Nobody said, ok, you've got five more years
and then you're done or you've got to do this or you've got to do that.
It's all. Well, we have this next study we're gonna do and everybody says
, isn't that wonderful? And we've got this study and isn't that wonderful
? And we've tried this well, the planning of the Humpback chub and all
these tributaries has worked. But what happens if we don't solve the
German Brown Tribe issue? Uh What happens if people who like the idea of
flattening the river, let the river warm up and we get striped bass in the
river? I mean, where, you know, I mean, there's many, many things have
been tried and, and, and the oops factor has business and started with ro
knowing the river that created the endangered fish problem in the first
place. Uh because they want to put recreational fish in the river for
people to enjoy.
But there are solutions. But the solutions are gonna require
a change in mindset. In my view, people are gonna watch
to have
uh answers and want to have each other's interests
mature into solutions. That, that makes sense and that provide value to
each of the interests involved in the thing. They're gonna want everybody
to win and that ain't there now. Not even close.
I think that's an excellent place to wrap up. That's probably one of the
most articulate criticisms we've had of uh of the program um in, in our
oral history interview. So that was very valuable. Thank you. Thank you
for that. I'll teach you to come to my house
and drink my tangelo juice. That was excellent tangelo juice.