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. . . Western States Water Council Water Resources Committee Minutes Washington, D.C. March 28, 2006 conducted. BOR's Managing for Excellence program will tee up with NWRA programs. NWRA plans to put data together to develop a database to present to Congress to show them what the needs will be. This effort began nine months ago. We want to get Congress' attention on this issue. We are pressing the Senate to hold hearings. Last July, The House Water and Power Subcommittee held a hearing. It was well attended and folks were engaged. We're trying to do the same thing in the Senate. The biggest problem is how to fund the effort to modernize and rehabilitate aging projects over the next few years. Needs vary. Where there are vendable outputs to the projects, such as power production, they can get required funding for repairs and they have. Other projects that were single purpose projects do not have many vendable outputs. The absolute poster child is the Milk River Project in Montana. Tom visited the project last summer and was appalled. It is falling apart, but it presents Congress with a difficult policy dilemma. The project was completed in 1912, and it was heavily subsidized then as an irrigation project. It was a partnership that Congress needed. Not much has changed up there. There are some Indian trust responsibilities and wildlife mitigation, and also some municipal water supply. The cost to rehabilitate is $125 million, which is beyond the ability of farmers to repay. So it means a resubsidization of the project by the federal government. Coming up with that kind of money out of the federal coffers causes real problems. Now let's switch to the middle ground projects. They may have vendable outputs, but they cannot pay back the projects over the short term. At present, major rehabilitation costs are considered O&M costs, and must be paid back within one year. They could pay things back over a period of years, but because of the BOR repayment regulations, they must pay back even exceptional O&M costs within one year. They can't. We need to review and change this process. NWRA's survey was developed to quantify the problem. We have received 18 surveys back. It's starting to show that within the next 20 years, there are major repairs that will need to be made. Most of them are 10-20 years out. So we have some time to work with Congress. Bill Rinne, Acting Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) spoke next. He made the point that process wise, they are aggressively out front with their Management for Excellence plan, in response to the NAS recommendations. Teams are set up. There will be a meeting in Las Vegas or Salt Lake or Denver on April 27-28. The process will be open to comment. A congressional hearing will be held on April 5. From Reclamation's standpoint, they believe this effort is helpful. On aging infrastructure, he noted there are 470 dams and dikes under Reclamation's responsibility. Most were built many years ago. Active maintenance has been done, but modem technologies were not available at the time they were built. The Safety of Dams Program provides for condition assessment ratings and periodic reviews of dams are performed. OfBOR associated water facilities, only 5% are listed as in poor condition, and 65% are listed as good. With respect to operation and maintenance (O&M), there are reserved works that are owned and operated by BOR, and there are transferred works where the project sponsor does O&M. About one- third are BOR reserved works, another third are transferred works, and the remainder are mixed. To 9