Holtwood Public Meetings Planned for April (PA)

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commmission (FERC) will be holding a site visit and public scoping meetings for the Holtwood Hydroelectric Project on Pennsylvania‘s Susquehanna River on April 17, 2008.  The meetings are intended to help them identify the scope of issues to be addressed as they consider a proposal by the dam owner to expand their facilities and delay relicensing for 16 years.

The daytime scoping meeting will focus on resource agency concerns, while the evening scoping meeting is primarily for public input.  All interested individuals, organizations, and agencies are invited to attend one or both of the meetings, and to assist the FERC staff in identifying the environmental and recreational issues that should be analyzed in the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).  The times and locations of these meetings are as follows:

The meetings will be recorded by a court reporter and will become part of the formal record of the Commission proceeding on the project.  To help focus discussions, FERC has issued Scoping Document 1 (SD1), which outlines the subject areas to be addressed in the EIS.  You can download SD1 from the document box to the right of this article.

Meeting Objectives

At the scoping meetings, the staff will:  (1) summarize the environmental issues tentatively identified for analysis in the EIS; (2) solicit from the meeting participants all available information, especially quantifiable data, on the resources at issue; (3) encourage statements from experts and the public on issues that should be analyzed in the EIS, including viewpoints in opposition to, or in support of, the staff’s preliminary views; (4) determine the resource issues to be addressed in the EIS; and (5) identify those issues that require a detailed analysis, as well as those issues that do not require a detailed analysis.

Individuals, organizations, and agencies with environmental expertise and concerns are encouraged to attend the meetings and to assist the licensee and Commission staff in defining and clarifying the issues to be addressed in the EIS.  Please review the SD1 in preparation for the scoping meetings.  Instructions on how to obtain copies of the SD1 are included above.

Site Visit

The site visit to Holtwood dam will take place at 10:30 am on Thursday April 17, 2008.  We will meet at the security gate; parking is limited so participants are encouraged to car pool. Access to the dam site is secure, and any individuals wishing to participate in the site visit will be required to meet the licensee’s public safety requirements.

AW Project Update

Paddlers have been in negotiations with the power company for over a year on this issue.  The current hydro project reduces boating days from an average of 197 days per year to 84 days.  The proposed project modifications would further reduce boating days to a mere 51 days.  To mitigate the loss of days, loss of features, and the delay in relicensing, two options have been identified.  The first involves the provision of releases by spilling water over the dam through existing whitewater features to restore boating opportunities.  The second, and likely the more efficient and elegant proposal, involves creating two new whitewater features downstream of a single turbine and providing releases that serve as both power production and recreational releases.  While an unusual solution, this latter proposal will likely be more cost efficient, produce more power and benefit fisheries more than spilling water over the dam.  We hope to reach settlement on this issue in the coming weeks, however at this time no agreement has been reached.

Our interest is in protecting at least the existing boating opportunities, while mitigating ongoing impacts.  Specifically, the 33 (8 hour) days of boating that would be eliminated by the proposed project modifications should be re-integrated into the proposed operations.  Mitigation should thus add a minimum of 264 hours of releases or spills annually to the proposed future operations, which need not be provided as 8-hour days, for a total of 672 hours representative of 84 days of boating opportunities. 

Interested paddlers are encouraged to attend these meetings.  If you cannot attend but would like to comment on the Scoping Document or the project in general, please send your comments to carla@americanwhitewater.org and we’ll forward your comments to FERC.   

For more information from FERC, contact Linda Stewart, telephone:  (202) 502-6680, and e-mail:  linda.stewart@ferc.gov.